When looking back on my elementary school social studies I don’t remember much from this time. The lessons I remembered the most was learning about Lewis and Clark, creating a PowerPoint on a current issue (a list that was compiled from the class), Native Americans, pioneers, and creating trifold boards on a state mine was Florida and a year later doing one on a country I did it on Italy. I feel like in elementary school we focused a lot on the geography aspects of social studies rather than covering the history portion that didn’t come until junior high when we went more in-depth. There were times when we would cover history; it was usually when we were reading and it would relate to the topic, but we never had set lessons for it.
For elementary social studies I think it is important for the lesson to be structured and with multiple exposures that is why I remembered Lewis and Clark the most. Each part of the expedition was broken down into a reading we do as a class. During these readings we would also do other activities that were related to the reading. When I had to create something for a lesson it helped me remember more because of the effort I put into the lesson. Our school had a fair for our state and country trifolds, so the entire school would stop by throughout the day and look at all of the boards. So, as students we would want our boards to look the best. Some people would put artifacts by their boards from that place and little papers with designs on them.
Social Studies inquiry is about seeing what the students know and their prior knowledge of a topic and building upon it. This is a great way to see that students are naturally interested in and how it might be related to what is being discussed. A great example of social studies inquiry would be the PowerPoint on a current issue, because the students created the entire by adding two of their own ideas. Then we got to choose what topic we wanted to do a PowerPoint on. For the PowerPoint we did our own research and then we would present that information later to the class.
