Page 246 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

218 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
to memorize for a test. Biographies can be a useful resource for engaging children in personal stories about the past. Egan (1986) suggests that if teaching were regarded more as storytelling, the curriculum could become a collection of great stories of many cultures. This could make learning more engaging and likely to be remembered. Story- telling can be a powerful strategy when you select anecdotes that illustrate big ideas and general principles. Stories provide opportunities for children to make connections between their lives and those of people living in other times or places.
The stories can come from your own repertoire of personal experiences, from stories that have been passed down to you from previous generations, from children’s literature, or from your own students. For example, if you were teaching about pioneer life, you might share stories that have been passed down through your ancestors about schools, curriculum and instruction, and approaches to discipline in the past. If you were teach- ing about the Great Depression, you might draw on what your ancestors have shared about their experiences with food and gasoline rationing or bartering among neighbors. Perhaps your family has letters, journals, or other artifacts to enhance the story about the stock market crash. If your class were studying social issues such as homelessness or hunger, you could draw on children’s literature and retell stories such as The Circuit (Jimenez, 1997) or Uncle Willie and the Soup Kitchen (DiSalvo-Ryan, 1991). These stor- ies depict elementary school children in stressful situations, in ways that promote empa- thy and cognitive understandings.
Hamilton and Weiss (1990) describe several learning processes that are supported by storytelling. These include listening, speaking, sharing ideas with others and accepting their reactions, and marshaling ideas and stories to address a specific problem or topic. Of prime importance, however, is the shared experience among classmates and the bonding that ensues and transcends gender, social class, and culture.
As you develop your social studies units and search for ways of helping students make meaning and connect with the content both cognitively and affectively, consider the use of stories and storytelling. They offer familiar narrative contexts that support learning and can be very engaging. Make sure that the goals and powerful ideas do not get lost in details and save enough time following the story for debriefing.
Investigation of Visuals
The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” expresses the power of visuals, but alignment with the unit’s goals is essential. For introducing new content, you might select visuals such as pictures or photographs to stimulate interest, foster speculation and hypothesizing, establish an anticipatory learning set, or link the new learning to prior learning (such as by providing students with opportunities to compare and contrast or make predictions from the old to the new).
For both lower and upper elementary students, visuals are critical for teaching social studies, and for history and geography in particular. Since one cannot “see the past,” children greatly benefit from studying visual resources such as historical paintings, photo- graphs, and drawings. In geography lessons, children need to see maps, photographs, drawings, and paintings from various countries and cultures.
Criteria for selecting visuals for new learning include selecting those that promote curiosity (e.g., a montage of photos that illustrates changes in communication over time); illustrate sequences or connections (e.g., photos that illustrate the land-to-hand relationship of wool to cloth and the idea that pioneer clothing was made out of local resources); broaden the meaning and cast the familiar within a global and multicultural perspective (e.g., photos that depict a range of shelter types and construction materials to
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