The "College, Career, and Civil Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards" guides teachers to initiate complex inquiries by sparking students' disciplinary literacy and critical analysis of rich sources. With effective scaffolding and engaging content, elementary students can explore and contextualize complex historical…

Teachers strive to design instruction that actively engages all students, but a few "back-benchers" often seem to be left out, due to academic struggles, English language skills, personal disinterest, or other factors. Teachers seek to help these students develop into "active and engaged participants" in their classrooms in…

Biography is a popular approach to history education in the younger grades, especially when teaching units of study during Women's History Month, which is March. A biography-centered approach, however, can be problematic when such lessons are not tied to any context, promoting the misconception that individuals create social change in isolation.…

Standing tall in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty is an enduring symbol of America. Layers of historical content and symbolism are uncovered in books that tell various parts of her story. By reading one or more of these books, students can begin to see that the experience of immigration is complex--it's not one narrative, but many that…

In an effort to gain greater insights into bilingual and bicultural children's understanding of their cultural and linguistic identities, the authors embarked on a Where I'm From (WIF) multi-media poetry project. The WIF project has great potential and value for developing students' language and communication skills, and for exploring the meaning…

In this article, the author relates how she realized that she needed to differentiate her approach in teaching the subject of immigration to her students. She realized that most of her students find themselves far removed from the experiences of immigrants. The unit that she developed at her class in Trinity has much in common with the…

In this article, the author describes some of the teaching methods she uses to teach how different American Indian groups lived in different regions of the North American continent. Her lessons include a number of projects: (1) Practicing symbolic writing; (2) Creating a personal timeline; (3) Studying winter counts and creating a personalized…