Page 176 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

her ideas and attitudes about a topic before teaching it, to avoid any uninten- tional negativity.
This chapter is informative, engaging, helpful, and will definitely be useful when teaching psychology, sociology, economics, and civics and government. When reading it, not only did I think about what I can do in my classroom with each of these social science areas but also what I need to consider in order to project a positive attitude. With the help of the content of this chapter, I now have a firm grasp on why social studies is important in an elementary classroom; it really does help students become contributing members to our democratic society.
Principle 5: Coherent Content: To facilitate meaningful learning and retention, content is explained clearly and developed with emphasis on its structure and connections. Coherent content refers to content whose knowledge and skills are connected to each other, whereby the sequence of ideas or events makes sense and the relationships are apparent. Coherent content is facilitated through the use of powerful ideas as an organizational tool. Please see Chapter 14 for a more in-depth description of this principle.
Coherent Content
148 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
The social studies curriculum in the primary grades typically consists of lessons organized within the expanding communities sequence and emphasizing content from history, geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics. This content is introduced where it emerges naturally within the pan-disciplinary social studies curriculum, and it is developed relatively informally. That is, even where it appears within its own units, instruction is confined to developing a cluster of concepts and principles without attempting to provide a general introduction to the disciplines.
As an elementary social studies teacher, you should acquire sufficient familiarity with each of the social sciences to enable you to represent them faithfully when teach- ing aspects of their content. Research indicates that networks of connected knowledge structured around powerful ideas can be learned with understanding and retained in forms that make them accessible for application. If you have not had basic courses in some of these disciplines, we recommend that you study introductory textbooks in each of them, continuing until you have a clear idea about how practitioners of the discipline think about and carry out their work. This will help ensure that the social science content you teach is both accurate and true to the spirit of the discipline that produced it.
In the previous chapters we addressed history, geography, and anthropology, so in this chapter, we will consider psychology, sociology, economics, and political science (civics and government) content typically taught in the elementary grades. We will address the nature of this content, students’ likely prior knowledge and misconceptions relating to it, and standards and other guidelines for teaching.
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