Incorporating poetry into the social studies curriculum can help students develop reading and writing skills while building their content knowledge.

The authors describe five types of inquiry that keep students engaged, promote student agency, and meet the need of teachers for curriculum flexibility.   

September 10, 2020 NCSS Signs Statement Expressing Concerns about the Delivering Immediate Relief to America’s Families, Schools and Small Businesses Act Silver Spring, MD -- National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) recently joined other members of the COVID-19 Education Coalition in signing a statement expressing deep concerns with the Delivering Immediate Relief to America’s Families, Schools and Small Businesses Act. Concerns regarding the Act came from its low education funding levels, its fixation on physical reopening of school…

Earlier this summer, my family and I went on vacation to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. We spent much of the time hiking at the two large state parks around the lake. As we were planning our hikes each day, we carefully studied the hiking maps provided by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. The description of one trail immediately caught my eye: “Bluestem Knoll Trail gives hikers an idea of how the Ozark landscape looked when settlers first arrived more than two centuries ago. Widely spaced trees, tall native grasses and wildflowers were characteristic of the natural…

Comparing questions from the 1920 Census and the 2020 Census can be a great jumping off point into a lesson on the importance of a national count and how Census questions reflect the prior decade.

A classroom examination of the featured historical article announcing North Carolina’s ratification of the Constitution can springboard into a lesson on federalism, the Bill of Rights, and the ratification process.

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United States is a country of white people, and people of color have little or no place in it. The author presents silenced-yet-powerful stories of three Americans—girls of Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican ancestry—who fought for equal education in America…

Teaching a civil rights unit in the upper elementary grades can be difficult. Educators must sort through multiple resources, determine the quality and developmental appropriateness of the materials, synthesize and organize the resources into meaningful lessons, and teach the unit in the midst of pressures to minimize or eliminate social studies in deference to tested subjects. Many elementary teachers find this a daunting task, which they avoid. The authors suggest a ‚Äúdepth over breadth‚Äù model focused around children‚Äôs literature texts and primary sources. This article reviews selected…