Teacher practices created experiences for students to guide their inquiry by creating opportunities to gather data through field notes. Students examined their county and gathered data from the field on a daylong investigation of their county. Students generated questions and considered their observations at multiple stops. Students learned to…

This article describes a lesson plan that encouraged the usage of digital tools to enhance inquiry as a key tool in teaching elementary social studies. The lesson revolved around a field trip to the home of Civil War Governor Oliver P. Morton (Centerville, Indiana). The active, investigative, and questioning nature of inquiry in social studies…

Looking for social studies adventures to help students find connections to democratic citizenship? Look no further! This book provides just the answer teachers need for engaging students in field trips as researching learners with emphasis on interdisciplinary social studies plus skills in collecting and reporting data gathered from field…

Teachers use a number of instructional strategies to help students develop citizenship skills and learn state and local history. In many communities, teachers include field trips and walking tours to help students learn more about people. In this article, the author describes how third-grade students learned from older students and from their…

Each year, about 70 4th- and 5th-grade students from an elementary school in an Indiana urban area participate in an extracurricular social studies enrichment program called the Clio Club. Clio is derived from the Greek muse of history, and the club offers a variety of activities to help students discover and interpret social studies beyond the…

Children in two first-grade classes and their teachers decided to take an imaginary trip to Washington D.C. For three weeks, the first graders spent their afternoons on the project, and their simulated flight was the culminating activity of a unit on Washington, D.C. In this article, the author discusses several details of the activity,…

Science teacher Don Wertz and social studies teacher Larry Taulman grew up in Johnson County and lived next to Edinburg and Camp Atterbury when it was in operation. What became known as "The Atterbury Files" began when these two teachers started gathering information for a field trip to the old army base that had been active when they were…

Many young people live in communities with historically interesting buildings, and tours of those historical sites can reveal much about life in the past. Something that students often overlook in the analysis of historic sites is the civic values held by the people who lived there. The ideas of architecture cannot be divorced from the people or…