The Internet offers a wide array of resources for social studies teachers. Digital interactives, in particular, offer promise. They combine images, sounds, videos, and animation and are organized around specific themes or historical subjects. Verizon’s Thinkfinity and the Public Broadcasting...

Many students live in a constantly changing, fast-paced, technological world that includes instant access to music, videos, images, information, and friends. The hours they spend in school, however, most often do not reflect a similar environment. Rather, they are often subjected to obsolete...

Despite the benefits of historical thinking pedagogy, many teachers continue to require students to read textbooks. Contained within textbook narratives are particular types of implied causation, asyndetic constructions, which may limit students’ abilities to fully comprehend certain textbook...

This multi-day lesson involves pre-kindergarten - grade 3 students in exploring the similarities found in grandchild-grandparent relationships across the world’s cultures. It stresses key concepts associated with these relationships: love; listen; explore; tell stories; play; teach; learn;...

This lesson uses Steel Town to explore the making of steel and life in a steel mill town during the Great Depression. Moving through four centers, students explore resources such as photographs, first-hand accounts, recipes, and songs from the era to learn what life was like at a steel mill, in...

Moon Over Manifest is a Newbery Award winning novel that focuses on the adventures of Abilene Tucker in Manifest, Kansas in 1936. The book travels back and forth between 1918-1919 and 1936. The book is part detective story and part coming of age. It is rich in social studies themes. Among its...

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a post-apocalyptic tale that takes place in a barely recognizable North America. Told in the voice of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a citizen of the desperately poor District 12, the reader learns of the government’s method of keeping the deprived...

How I Learned Geography is an autobiographical story based on the author’s childhood memories of fleeing Poland during World War II. First, students demonstrate their prior knowledge of the relationship between maps and places by working with a partner to complete an Anticipation Guide. Next,...

This study contributes to existing scholarship on democratic education by focusing explicitly on the affective dynamics of teaching with and for discussion. More specifically, the purpose of this research is to critically analyze the first author’s efforts to address the role of emotion in...