Shrink and squeeze: today\u27s teaching pressures and its effect on teaching social studies

Social studies education is one of the four core subjects taught to students in elementary schools. Teaching social studies provides students with the content knowledge and ways of thinking to allow them to be participating members in their communities. Although there are many skills students learn from social studies, due to federal legislation starting with No Child Left Behind, social studies has been put on the back burner while math and reading take the forefront. The goal of this study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of teachers regarding their social studies teaching. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with veteran teachers about their current approach to teaching social studies and changes they have made given the increasing marginalization of this subject area. Major themes related to social studies in fifth grade classes included a lack of emphasis on social studies, reduced instructional time, a changed instructional approach, gaps in student learning, a changed teaching response, and increased teacher advocacy

Activities for Challenging Gifted Learners by Increasing Complexity in the Common Core

Gifted learners need opportunities for critical and creative thinking to stretch their minds and imaginations. Strategies for increasing complexity in the four core areas of language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies were addressed using the Common Core and Iowa Core Standards through several methods. Descriptive adjective object boxes were created, based on the themes of bees, surface area and volume, cultural beliefs and mummies, and bee colony collapse disorder. The sets of materials were used in various ways to increase the complexity of instruction in the core subject areas of literacy, mathematics, social studies, and science. The descriptive adjective boxes consisted of several small objects related to a theme with corresponding cards. This card set provided activities to increase the complexity of the topics. [This paper is based on the conference presentation, Smartening up the Common Core: Increasing Complexity for Gifted Learners that was presented at the Iowa Talented and Gifted (ITAG) Annual Conference: Reaching for the Future (Des Moines, Iowa, Oct 13-14 2014.)