Literature Based Social Studies

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.

Fredericks presents hundreds of hands-on, minds-on projects that actively engage students in positive learning experiences. Each of the units offers book summaries, social studies topic areas, critical thinking questions, classroom resources, and lots of easy-to-do activities for every grade level. The author also provides practical guidelines for collaborative ventures with school librarians, tips for integrating literature across the curriculum, lists of relevant web sites useful in social studies curriculum. Everything is linked to the social studies standards.

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.

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.

Learning in secondary school classrooms involves much more than students reciting the "right" answers on high-stakes tests. This activity-packed book encourages educators to move beyond traditional models of teaching and learning and provides them with the tools for getting started. 100 Experiential Learning Activities for Social Studies, Literature, and the Arts, Grades 5–12 focuses on using active learning to engage students in critical thinking and reflection about complex content knowledge in the humanities and the arts. The 100 activities address significant social issues, including social justice, culture, language, and diversity. Teachers can emphasize comprehension, encourage creative thinking, and promote transfer across disciplines to help students: • Explore primary sources to uncover practical and relevant information • Construct careful arguments to integrate new learning with prior knowledge • Question deeply held assumptions to arrive at authentic understandings • Approach new ideas with confidence Take your students through meaningful learning experiences and make knowledge come alive!

Contents: Objectives in Teaching Social Studies, Scope and Sequence in the Social Studies, Trends and Issues in the Social Studies, Learning Opportunities in the Social Studies, Pupil Learning in the Social Studies, Reading in the Social Studies, Writing in the Social Studies, Social Studies Children s Literature, Grouping for Instruction in the Social Studies, Leadership in the Social Studies, Social Studies and Democracy in the Classroom, Technology in the Social Studies Curriculum, Maps, Globes and the Social Studies, Current Events in the Social Studies, Social Studies, Integrating School and Society, Measurement and Evaluation in the Social Studies, Social Studies in Teacher Education, Restructuring the Social Studies (A Public Debate).

The Use of Literary Sources in Social Studies, K-8 is a resource for teachers who wish to include varied literary genres in their social studies instruction along with a required social studies textbook. The literature described and exemplified in this book includes fiction, nonfiction, biographies, autobiographies, historical fiction, poetry, fairy tales, folktales, tall tales, and legends. Throughout this book, different instructional suggestions are presented for inclusion with varied social studies topics and literature sources. Each chapter contains questions and pedagogical strategies for critically reading and responding to varied literary genres, modifications to meet the needs of diverse learners, assessment techniques, information tied to technology and the “new literacies,” and connections to the National Curriculum Standards for the Social Studies: A Framework for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (2010) and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (2010). The final chapter of this book describes the development and implementation of a classroom library for social studies teaching and learning.