If you’ve ever had an amazing teacher who brought history to life for you, then you probably enjoyed learning. A great teacher throws away the social studies textbook. He or she allows students to explore history in real and relevant ways. This teaches about the past, but also how to learn and think critically about the future.
We love teaching social studies, but honestly, we very rarely teach it using the textbook. For one thing, textbooks provide a pretty condensed and cleansed version of the past. The reading level is way above our students’ comprehension skills. We use textbooks as reference materials only.
That means we need to have a way to bring social studies lessons alive for our students.
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