Page 170 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

142 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Anthropologists typically emphasize the importance of authentic representations of other cultures, and toward that end recommend liberal use of photos, videos, and cultural artifacts (or at least, authentic facsimiles). We recommend that you develop artifact kits to support your instruction about particular cultures. Many such kits can be purchased from supply houses catering to teachers. You also can collect useful materials on your own (e.g., during visits to Native American reservations or other countries). Besides using the collected mate- rials during instruction, you can feature them within centers where your students can go to learn more about the culture. Good children’s literature (both fiction and nonfiction) also is available for use as resources in teaching about cultures. Field (2003), for example, identifies more than 20 such sources for use in a unit on Mexico and provides guidelines for selecting additional sources and using them in learning activities.
Technology Tips
Information about cultures and accompanying lesson plans are widely available on websites like WethePeople.gov. Explore the Internet to find different lesson plans. Evaluate them for accuracy and cultural sensitivity and consider how you would use them.
How could you draw upon your travel or life experiences with other cultures in your social studies teaching?
How would you teach both similarities and
differences across cultures?
Summary
Geography is the study of people, places, and environ- ments from a spatial and ecological perspective. Much of the knowledge that geographers have accumulated can be organized within the five themes of absolute and relative location (position on the earth’s surface), the physical and human characteristics of places, human- environmental relationships within places, movement between places, and the formation and development of regions. Good geographic instruction builds understand- ings developed around these themes, rather than con- fronting students with parades of geographical facts (e.g., place names, import/export data).
Children enter school without much geographic knowledge as well as without much geographic aware-
ness. They have not yet come to appreciate how landforms, climate, and natural resources affect human population patterns and economic activities. They also harbor implicit leanings toward chauvinism, tending to prefer the familiar to the strange and to prefer their own country (or other people or entities with whom they identify) over others. Consequently, it is important to teach geography in ways that develop not only cognitive understandings but dispositions toward empathy and multicultural respect.
The textbook series offer generally good lessons and activities relating to map and globe skills, but in isolation from the rest of the curriculum. We recom- mend integrating them, and in particular routinely
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