Page 122 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

94 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
• All governments in the United States (e.g., community, township, city, state, and federal) provide some services for people.
• To pay for the services, the government collects money from the people. The money is referred to as taxes.
• Regulations (rules and laws) are designed to help people get along, keep things fair, protect individual and public property, and keep people safe.
• Government cannot be expected to do everything for its people.
• Volunteering is the act of giving time and sometimes money to promote a cause,
provide a service or work to solve a problem without making new laws.
• Volunteering is one way to practice responsible citizenship.
• When enough people volunteer to solve a problem, the need for making more laws or
raising taxes to pay for the additional service is lessened.
• Individuals can personally contribute time and money to help solve problems that
affect members of the community.
How do I address multicultural education (often referred to as diversity) in plan- ning my social studies units? Diversity comes in many forms. If it is truly respected and integrated into children’s lives, it needs to be affirmed early and be threaded throughout the K–12 curriculum both formally and informally. We have embedded it throughout our text rather than treated it in a separate chapter.
In our chapter on learning community we suggest a unit on childhood as the springboard for discussing the similarities among children as well as the uniqueness of every individual and the importance of differences. In the chapter on homework we promote the learning of all students. The backgrounds and cultures of students in your classroom are not simply ethnic additives, but contributors to everyone’s learning, such as when you create expanded social studies lessons using family response data.
We also suggest the importance of promoting empathy and avoiding stereotypes when selecting children’s literature. Instructional materials such as textbooks, videos, pic- tures, artifacts, and websites often contain such stereotypes, so you will need to bring up other examples. We encourage you to promote multiple perspectives throughout your units, partly because this creates natural ways of instilling diversity.
We view multicultural education as a way of looking at the world. We promote social and cultural capital by giving all students access to depth of social knowledge. The class- room teacher can make enormous positive differences for all children, and social studies is a natural venue for living multiculturally.
We find it ironic that pull-out programs often call for diverse students to be excused from social studies lessons and assigned to ESL sessions, speech therapy, special reading groups, and such. We encourage you to schedule social studies when all of your students can be in attendance. Other classroom guidelines include the following:
• Expect that students be respectful and thoughtful of one another.
• Hold appropriately high expectations for all children and build in strategies that help
them succeed at their grade level.
• Model “Teacher as Learner.” Share the pleasures of learning about new places, unfamiliar
customs, beliefs and values. Be matter-of-fact when dealing with differences. Model and
discuss how to encounter and deal with unfamiliar people and situations.
• Initiate frequent and open communication with all families.
• Get to know families so you can draw on them as resources that can enhance specific
aspects of the curriculum.
• Plan in-school activities that include families with an eye toward inclusiveness.
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