Page 123 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 4 What Social Studies Planning Tools Are Available? 95
When do I integrate? The short answer is: When it makes sense. Start with your primary content focus. For example, do not allow your social studies time to turn into an extended literacy period. Using round robin reading to cover the social studies text is a poor instructional choice for either subject.
Ask yourself questions such as “Would an outsider clearly recognize the lesson as social studies? Is the content drawn from other subjects authentic or enriching? Is it obvious that if I use skills from math or literacy, students are being asked to apply them in social studies settings to bring more meaning to both the content and the skills?”
Integration certainly should not be adopted as a shortcut. Rather, the content, skills, and activities included should be educationally significant and desirable even if they did not involve the cross-subjects feature. Secondly, the content, skills, and activities should foster rather than disrupt or modify the accomplishment of major social studies goals.
How do I select appropriate instructional strategies and activities? The possibil- ities are endless. The key to their effectiveness is their cognitive engagement potential—the degree to which they get students actively thinking about and applying content, pre- ferably with conscious awareness of their goals and the development of the big ideas.
All sorts of diversity exist within any classroom, so make room for variety. Often the content or skills lend themselves naturally to certain strategies or activities. For example, content associated with a faraway place unfamiliar to your students would be well suited to a virtual field trip; the study of local community officials would lend itself well to an on-site visit by the mayor or member of the city council; and the history of shelter might best be developed through the use of an interactive timeline. Other topics lend them- selves to debate, case studies, role plays, or simulations. Typically, we think of instruc- tional strategies as means of introducing and developing new content with the whole class, and activities as means of processing and applying the learning (as a whole class, in small groups or individually).
With all the emphasis on literacy, how do I spend a lot of time on it yet teach powerful social studies units? There are many natural connections. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening need to be about something; some literacy time ought to incorporate social studies content; and you are always using literacy when teaching social studies. However, guard against teaching new skills and new content simultaneously.
For example, if you are teaching the skill of selecting the main idea during literacy time, use familiar text. Then, during an upcoming social studies unit, design questions that focus on gleaning the big ideas from social studies sources. Increased use of infor- mational text can motivate many students who prefer that kind of reading as well as those who have a strong interest in the social studies topic. It also can expand opportunities for home-school connections (e.g., use of newspapers, magazines, reference materials, sets of directions for cooking/fixing things, the Internet) that support both social studies and literacy (Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2003).
Writing opportunities in social studies can allow students to construct and communi- cate understandings regarding the content and realize what they know or remain unclear about. Consider using independent brainstorming, table talk, or verbal pair share as opportunities for students to develop ideas to write about. Scaffold verbal collaboration by using modified word walls or other visual prompts as tools to jumpstart students’ thinking so they can focus on ideas they want to express rather than on spelling. Students’ writing vocabularies are far smaller than their speaking ones.
Similar cases for using literacy in the development of social studies understandings could be made for speaking and listening. Sharing ideas publicly through planned debate, reports, and class discussions promotes social studies learning, and so does asking students to listen for specific ideas and then think about and respond to questions.
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