Ch. 5 Social Studies

Social Studies has always been a subject that I have enjoyed teaching but felt overwhelmed by the massive amount of standards and the small amount of resources (even enough textbooks or the materials that go with the textbook have always been missing!) so I understand the argument Schmoker’s makes completely.  I agree that we need to use more primary documents and incorporate more about current events into the Social Studies curriculum.  I have already started doing more with current events using the newspaper and Time for Kids but primary documents is a little harder.  Luckily, with the internet we have access to lots of ideas but often it uses a lot of time to wade through the junk to find the one nugget that is a good quality primary document to use related to the unit.  Hopefully, Social Studies textbooks will start incorporating more primary sources within them in the future. 

I liked what Schmoker said about the need to “include something woefully lacking in the majority of classrooms: regular opportunities to mark up, annotate, or highlight one- to three-page articles and documents.” (pg. 153)  I have started doing more of this just this year thanks to a training I went to on teaching non-fiction.  I am also having students learn different styles of note-taking methods which I believe will be helpful for them.  This has not been easy as students are not used to having to do a deep, close reading of the text or take notes before but hopefully as more teachers move towards this they will become more accustomed to it being the expectation.