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Thursday, August 11, 2016

Squeeze in Social Studies



Raise your hand if you have time (or curriculum) for teaching Social Studies in your classroom!

Unless you’re teaching in a private school, you are probably focusing primarily on math and reading, but that doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze in a few meaningful Social Studies activities to cross curriculum!!

I DO teach Social Studies and I’m going to share how I represent it in my overpowering ocean themed Open House!  Math, writing, and science are easy to make ocean-y, but aside from Christopher Columbus or the colonies, how do I make social Studies fit my beautiful ocean themed Open House?!
Thus, the quilt was born (or rather I adopted it from the veteran teachers who came before me!)
Here’s how I display what my class has done in Social Studies all year long, but it would be PERFECT for crossing curriculum or enhancing special school dress up days as the year goes along!

OK, so we have six units in our Social Studies curriculum, but I feel like 3 of them could be just holiday or dress up day extension activities for you!!

Does your school still do Career Day? 
Whether you’re teaching about needs/wants, consumers/producers, and goods/services or economics, have your students design a business card for their career and write a short narrative about it using vocabulary!  Check out my other free Social Studies activities for economics in my TpT store!
Teaching about American symbols and presidents is perfect for the month of February.  Add in these simple square activities to start building your quilt!
During one of our units we learn about cultures and our families’ past, so each student gets to research and assemble a collage on a quilt square!  Make it whatever your students need to research in your grade level, historical figure, mission, state etc.!
MAPS!  How can you fit that into math or reading? Delve into the setting of one of your stories OR practice measurement by using a map scale!  We make ours when we learn about goods and trade.
Our last square that we make is a chart that compares and contrasts 4 different Native American groups.  Connect it to language arts under the guise of Venn Diagram skills to compare something from your grade level’s Social Studies curriculum.

After we make a quilt square, I always display it across a bulletin board for the unit we’re in at that time.  Then I take them down and store them for the end of the year when I will haul all those squares back out for the Open House display.  Because what ocean doesn’t have a quilt?

I hope you get inspired to teach Social Studies, even if it’s just 6 short mini-lessons!
Squeeze it in & make it count!

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