Social Studies/History
Explore and share tips, strategies, and resources for helping students develop in the social sciences.
How Battlefield Analysis Supports Strategic Thinking
Examining decisions made in wartime can help middle and high school students strengthen their critical thinking and collaboration skills.773Your content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.Facilitating Student-Centered Work in Upper Elementary
Setting up a successful inquiry elevates the learning experience. Here’s how you can support students in forming their driving question.Your content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.An Effective Strategy for Teaching With Videos
Rather than showing long videos, teachers should design lessons that use clips as resources to spur class discussion.Your content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.Writing Notes by Hand for Better Processing
When teachers regularly pause during lectures so students can synthesize their thoughts with handwritten notes, content is more likely to stick.Increasing Participation With Individual Whiteboards
When an entire class uses mini whiteboards to make thinking visible, teachers can be confident everyone is focused on the task at hand.47.6kYour content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.Warming Up Cold Calling by Writing Ideas Down First
When students can respond to questions on mini-whiteboards prior to being called on, they feel more prepared—and everyone participates in thinking through the answers.Activities That Make Geography Memorable
Exploring maps through games and discussions helps elementary students gain a deep understanding of relationships between places.964Your content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.Evaluating Primary Sources Through a See, Think, Wonder
By taking the time to observe, make inferences, and ask great questions about historical artifacts and images, students learn to avoid jumping to conclusions.Inquiry-Based Tasks in Social Studies
Assignments that are bigger than a lesson and smaller than a unit are a good way to experiment with inquiry-based learning.207.3kYour content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.60-Second Strategy: Quick Sorts
In this formative assessment game, table groups compete against each other to categorize key terms and concepts from the previous night’s assignment.Talking Politics: Valuing Different Perspectives
Students learn how to share and listen to opposing beliefs with empathy.206.4kYour content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.6 Free Online Resources for Primary Source Documents
The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents.298.5kYour content has been saved!
Go to My Saved Content.AI Tool Demo: Canva’s Text-to-Image Generator
Assistant editor Daniel Leonard shows how teachers are using Canva’s AI image generator to create fun writing prompts and engaging history-oriented images.Fewer Tasks but More Rigor
Adding more steps to a social studies project doesn’t necessarily make it more rigorous—there are better ways to appropriately challenge students.AI Tool Demo: Creative Uses for ChatGPT in History and ELA
Assistant editor Daniel Leonard shares a few interesting applications of ChatGPT that teachers have adopted to drive critical thinking and deeper analysis.
