A collection of hands on learning activities with creative ideas that fit in nicely with alternative assessments.

Prepares readers to become high-quality humanities and social sciences educators for early childhood and primary contexts.

This teacher-friendly resource provides practical arts-based strategies for classroom teachers to use in teaching social studies content. Overview information and model lessons are provided for each strategy and ideas are provided for grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The strategies addressed within the book allow teachers to make social studies instruction come alive and best meet students' needs.

Teaching History with Museums provides an introduction and overview of the rich pedagogical power of museums. In this comprehensive textbook, the authors show how museums offer a sophisticated understanding of the past and develop habits of mind in ways that are not easily duplicated in the classroom. Using engaging cases to illustrate accomplished history teaching through museum visits, this text provides pre- and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and museum educators with ideas for successful visits to artifact and display-based museums, historic forts, living history museums, memorials, monuments, and other heritage sites. Each case is constructed to be adapted and tailored in ways that will be applicable to any classroom and encourage students to think deeply about museums as historical accounts and interpretations to be examined, questioned, and discussed.

Contributors to this volume offer insights from the discipline of history about the nature of empathy and the necessity of examining perspectives on the past. On the basis of recent classroom research, they suggest tested guides to more robust teaching. The contributors insist that with experienced history and social studies teachers, students can learn many historical details and, with the use of empathy, develop deepened and textured interpretations of the history that they study.

This book provides social studies teachers and education professors with new ideas that will invigorate their classrooms and energize students. These creative activities and resources will help teachers make learning fun, inject humor into the classroom, and illustrate the connections between American history, cultural changes, human behavior, current events, and students' lives. The lessons tap into students' creativity, encourage spontaneity, cater to visual and aural learners, involve movement, and incorporate art.