Elementary Social Studies: Constructing a Powerful Approach to Teaching and Learning

This text frames and develops a coherent, practical, and engaging approach to teaching and learning elementary social studies. The authors combine the latest research on learning patterns, curriculum structure and presentation, and assessment with practical issues like classroom management, goal establishment, and creative lesson planning.

Elementary Social Studies is organized according to four commonplaces of education?learners and learning, subject matter, teachers and teaching, and classroom environment?to help teachers create a powerful learning environment for their students. The Second Edition includes additional emphasis on issues of multiculturalism and diversity and teaching in the lower primary grades.

• Theory-to-Practice examples, identifiable by marginal icons, concentrate on incorporating constructivist principles into the teaching/learning process (Chapter 2), and on choosing teaching strategies, curriculum materials, and classroom assessments (Chapter 5).
• References to social studies standards and standardized assessments throughout the text help students understand how their lessons relate to the certification process and the assessment of schools, teachers, and students.
• Explicit connections between social studies and language arts instruction (Chapter 4) are drawn to provide guidance on teaching in schools that have marginalized social studies instruction in order to concentrate on reading and math in preparation for standardized testing.
• Houghton Mifflin Video Cases, four- to six-minute video modules presenting real classroom scenarios, enable students to observe the day-to-day challenges and rewards of teaching from the convenience of their computers. Available on the Online Teaching and Study Centers, HM Video Cases are enhanced by classroom artifacts, Viewing Questions, Interview Transcripts, Key Terms, and bonus video footage.

S. G. Grant is an associate professor of Social Studies Education in the Department of Learning and Instruction at the State University of New York, Buffalo. His research interests lie at the intersection of state curriculum and assessment policies and teachers' classroom practices, with a particular emphasis in social studies.

Bruce VanSledright is a teacher educator and researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests include how teachers teach and children learn history and social studies, and how prospective teachers can be helped to become the ambitious history and social studies teachers of the future.