Teaching Social Studies in K-5- Thoughts about Guiding Principles

Social Studies is most important in the early years of an elementary child’s schooling. It is often the most neglected subject that is taught in the elementary grades. It ranks with less importance than Math and ELA, but offers the most natural link to fostering curiosity, learning, reading, and writing. It is the subject that is taught when there is time left in the day. It is the subject that the classroom teacher is less prepared to teach. Teachers are lucky to have had a college US History course and many have to rely on their knowledge from their high school days. It is the subject that most teachers depend on a text book that may be outdated or does not match their state’s current standards. It is the subject that teachers teach the way their teachers taught when they were in school.

This blog post will attempt to address the importance of doing history in elementary grades. Throughout this writing I will base my knowledge from the book titled National Standards for Social Studies published by National Center for History in Schools. The book was published in 1996 and it is very forward thinking with how social studies and US History instruction should be carried out in our schools. Also the writing is based on my observations and other reading in my 22 teaching career and the last six months observing and learning from 29 professional educators in their classrooms and in professional learning communities and networking with other Teaching American History Grant Directors across the United States.

According to Brian Cambourne’s Model of Learning, learners have to be immersed in all kinds of text or curricula activity that has been scaffold to meet their learning needs. It may be through demonstration, images, multimodal texts, sounds, video, artifacts, primary source, and more followed by engagement. This is followed by the learner’s creation of knowledge. Therefore, in helping the early learner, there are six guiding principles that teachers and school curricula people must conscious of in their buildings and classroom.

Guiding Principles for the Development of Standards for K-5

1. Children should begin from kindergarten to build historical understandings and perspectives and to think historically. It is our responsibility in the early years to support the condition of fostering children’s natural curiosity and imagination. It is important to provide them opportunities to reach out in time and space, and expand their world of understanding far beyond their immediate world.  (Schools, p. 3) Young learners must struggle through and learn the world that must be shared with their peers and family members. So often young learners have not had to share their environment with such a broader community. I have witnessed more often the natural curiosity and imagination these learners bring to the classroom.  Their historical understanding begins by learning the social norms in a classroom environment. Most elementary teachers do this so naturally.
2. Although young children are only in the early stages of acquiring concepts of chronology and time, they easily learn to differentiate time present, time past, and time “long, long ago”-skills on which good programs in historical thinking can then build over grades K-4. (Schools, 1996)
3. Chronology, time, and space are difficult concepts but our K-5 student needs ample opportunities to engage in learning activities where they have to learn about order, time, and space. These opportunities occur often in stories they read or are told and when they have opportunities to create their own stories. It happens in play time. It happens when teaching biographies of people like Abe Lincoln, George Washington or Barrack Obama.
4. To bring history alive, an important part of children’s historical studies should be centered in people-the history of families and of people, ordinary and extraordinary, who have lived in children’s own community, state, nation, and the world. (Schools, p. 3) Usually I begin my first writing workshop in the many years I taught in elementary grades by reading When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant. In the same day we discuss how the text was written with that rhythm of the word When I was young… and the student spend a the first few days writing a poem about their life using Rylants book as a mentor text. It becomes their story about who they are and the history that surrounds their life. Teaching history has to begin with their life and that is what our standards do in South Carolina. It grows from self to the world we live in. Each year of study builds upon the learning that happens in more formal studies of history in later years.
5. History becomes especially accessible and interesting to children when approached through stories, myths, legends, and biographies that capture children’s imaginations and immerse them in times and cultures of the recent and long-ago past. (Schools, p. 3) We have a wealth of authors who are writing historical fiction and writing non-fiction. These stories help learner get a perspective of history through a different point of view. Fiction and biographies helps the learner to build experiences vicariously. It helps them build relationships and make connections with people in of the ages.
6. In addition to stories, children should be introduced to a wide variety of historical artifacts, illustrations, and records that open to them first-hand glimpses into the lives of people in the past: family photos; letters, diaries, digital media, and other accounts of the past obtained from family records, local newspapers, libraries, and museums; field trips to historical sites in their neighborhood and community; and visits to “living museums” where actors reenact life long ago. (Schools, p. 3)
7. All these resources should be used imaginatively to help children formulate questions for study and to support historical thinking, such as the ability to marshal information; create sound hypotheses; locate events in time and place; compare and contrast past and present; explain historical causes and consequences; analyze historical fiction and illustrations for their accuracy and perspectives, and compare with primary sources that accurately portray life, attitudes, and values in the past; compare different stories about an era or event in the past and the interpretations or perspectives of each; and create historical narratives of their own in the form of stories, letters such as a child long ago might have written, and descriptive accounts of events. (Schools, p. 3) This is most important to understand how history is shared and retold.

I guess the big question should follow next. How should this play out in a classroom? What should it look like? I don’t hold the answers fully to these questions. Brian Cambourne’s seven conditions for learning must be played out.  The learning process begins where our children are in space, time, and their experiences. Most of what happens in early years builds a learning model for something great that happens in sequential years of their life- not their formal schooling life.  Just Having an historical understanding of rules in a classroom give way to later learning about behavior in school, church, society, events, etc.  Learning about the importance of the Statue of Liberty and engaging learners in the making of replica crown like Lady Liberty create mental models for future learning and discussion in first and upper grades. Because the teacher paved the road about this national symbol,  it will make it easier for new learning to occur when the Statue of Liberty comes up in historical fiction, a discussion in or out of school, lesson, etc. Students will now have a frame of reference.

When students are asked to compare old photographs of police offers from 1900 with photographs with police officers in 2010, it will give the historical perspective. Just the fact that on photograph is black and white could lead to further discussion about time, place, and space as it did with a second grader I observed yesterday. She thought how strange the old black and white photograph looked compared to the 2010 photo. It made her giggle. The teacher used the moment to teach. Obviously the learner came to a new understanding about the changes in past and present communities.

I use these conditions or basic principles as expand what I am learning about teaching and learning social studies.

Schools, N. C. (1996). National Standards for History. Los Angeles: National Center for Education in the Schools.