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

Social Studies Comes Alive: Engaging, Effective Strategies for the Social Studies Classroom provides teachers with critical, creative, and inquiry-based activities to engage students in real-world projects and research. Students will benefit from learning professional research practices and products that can make a real difference in their lives and those within their communities. Within this text, teachers can select activities as needed to engage their students in authentic learning on any topic, moving beyond the traditional guided reading and worksheet approach. These instructional approaches and classroom activities are powerful tools for combating student indifference toward social studies that creeps in during middle school and high school. Each lesson comes with instructions and ideas for challenging students in order to guide them to self-directed learning. Grades 6-10

Jam-packed with classroom-tested, hands-on activities such as wondercircles, fan-fold books, paper-chain timelines, and more mapping and report writing ideas!

Social Studies Comes Alive provides teachers with critical, creative, and inquiry-based activities to engage students in action research. Students will benefit from learning professional research practices and products that can make a real difference in their lives and those within their communities. Within this text, teachers can select an activity without necessarily reading the entire text. This book expands the repertoire of the classroom teacher to engage and excite students. These instructional approaches and classroom activities are powerful tools for combating student indifference toward social studies that creeps in during middle school and high school. Each lesson comes with instructions and ideas for challenging students in order to guide them to self-directed learning.

During the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, millions of Americans engaged with the past in brand-new ways. They became absorbed by historical miniseries like Roots, visited museums with new exhibits that immersed them in the past, propelled works of historical fiction onto the bestseller list, and participated in living history events across the nation. While many of these activities were sparked by the Bicentennial, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska shows that, in fact, they were symptomatic of a fundamental shift in Americans' relationship to history during the 1960s and 1970s. For the majority of the twentieth century, Americans thought of the past as foundational to, but separate from, the present, and they learned and thought about history in informational terms. But Rymsza-Pawlowska argues that the popular culture of the 1970s reflected an emerging desire to engage and enact the past on a more emotional level: to consider the feelings and motivations of historic individuals and, most importantly, to use this in reevaluating both the past and the present. This thought-provoking book charts the era's shifting feeling for history, and explores how it serves as a foundation for the experience and practice of history making today.

The author is by turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, and wisecracking.

Just what exactly is social studies, you may ask? Well, it includes the study of all kinds of people and places, some far away and some next door. In this book we talk about families, like your family in your house, and also lots of people close by, which we call a town or city, and finally about even more people in cities or outside of cities, all living in big places called countries. My Story and the World Around Me is a course for lower elementary students. It includes basic introductions to history, politics, sociology, economics, and geography, and provides a fuller understanding of God’s world and the cultures of the countries. This is a daily adventure-based curriculum series that encourages families to explore the world together through four nine-week quests and to understand it better from God’s perspective. It is designed with elements that make weekly learning fun and interactive, including: Activity timeWord find timeReview timeMy story journal Learn all about the world while you discover more about your own. And make sure you pull out your Quest Collector Cards at the beginning of each quest. Your world map on the other side shows where you are in each lesson!