Connecting Social Studies Literature

Making Connections in Elementary and Middle School Social Studies, Second Edition is the best text for teaching primary school teachers how to integrate social studies into other content areas. This book is a comprehensive, reader-friendly text that demonstrates how personal connections can be incorporated into social studies education while meeting the National Council for the Social Studiese(tm) thematic, pedagogical, and disciplinary standards. Praised for its eoewealth of strategies that go beyond social studies teaching,e including classroom strategies, pedagogical techniques, activities and lesson plan ideas, this book examines a variety of methods both novice and experienced teachers alike can use to integrate social studies into other content areas.

Reproducible pages provide specific strategies and activities for integrating early elementary social studies curriculum with more than 35 related children's literature selections.

This book provides teachers, librarians, and education methods professors with strategies, lesson plans, and activities that enable them to use literature as a springboard to social studies thematic instruction. With the amount of time and resources allocated to teaching social studies being significantly reduced, social studies lessons need to be incorporated into other subjects. Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting Social Studies Back in the K-8 Curriculum offers the tools to teach students social studies concepts that are increasingly relevant and essential in today's diverse, globalized world--lessons that are vital in order to prepare students to think critically and participate in our multicultural democracy. Providing information that elementary and middle school teachers and librarians, district-level curriculum directors and principals, staff developers, and social studies and literacy methods professors will find extremely useful, this book uses the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)/Children's Book Council (CBC)'s current and past lists of Notable Books at the elementary and middle school levels to offer easy-to-follow lesson plans that integrate social studies instruction with reading and language arts. The lesson plans pose compelling questions to facilitate discussion and critical thinking and suggest engaging activities that are connected to the social studies concepts. The book also includes sample student handouts for the selected pieces of literature.

If you are searching for ideas to teach social studies in fun and meaningful ways, 50 Ways to Teach Social Studies is a book that provides a plethora of ideas of practical lessons connected to real-world topics that will save the busy teacher time and effort. The activities in this book are housed under themes and include content connections (civics, history, geography, economics), guiding questions, and literacy connections. From community, primary sources, and music to food, visual media, and experiential learning, this book will inspire you to make connections in your own environment to expand the teaching of social studies.

Take advantage of the appeal and power of Caldecott award literature to extend and promote learning across the curriculum. In these two volumes the author demonstrates how to use award-winning books as springboards to science and social studies learning in the library and classroom-and to expand student awareness and appreciation of illustration techniques. For each Caldecott title there is background information on the illustrations, curriculum connections, lesson plans, and support materials for teaching. Glandon also integrates Gardner's multiple intelligences with curriculum content. With a flexible, discovery approach, these activity units focus on student-centered, experiential, holistic, and authentic learning and they are ready for instant implementation. Targeted to primary grade objectives and abilities, the books include an array of individual projects and collaborative ones. They also foster collaborations between library media specialists and classroom teachers.

Use this activity-centered, literature-based approach to get students excited about social studies. These 32 units have summaries of books, social studies topic areas, lists of content-related words, curricular perspectives, and critical-thinking questions, as well as myriad activities. Fredericks also gives you an excellent annotated bibliography of children's literature and a list of social studies resources.

These dynamic literature-based activities will help you energize the social studies curriculum and implement national (and many of state) standards. Fredericks presents hundreds of hands-on, minds-on projects to stimulate actively and engage students in positive learning. Each of these 33 units offers book summaries, social studies topic areas, critical thinking questions, and dozens of easy-to-do activities for every grade level. The author also gives practical guidelines for integrating literature across the curriculum, lists of web sites useful in social studies classes, and annotated bibliographies of related resources.