How to Teach Map Skills in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Grade
Teaching map skills in the primary grades gives students a framework for understanding the world around them — starting with their own classroom and expanding outward to communities, countries, and…
Social studies instruction helps students understand history, geography, communities, and the connections between past and present. In elementary classrooms, effective social studies teaching includes analyzing historical events, researching influential figures, building map skills, and encouraging thoughtful discussion about civic themes. These resources are designed to support both content knowledge and critical thinking.
Teaching map skills in the primary grades gives students a framework for understanding the world around them — starting with their own classroom and expanding outward to communities, countries, and…
There’s something truly magical about watching a young mind grasp a new concept, and one of my absolute favorite units to deliver this magic is the Long Ago and Today…
Teaching a biography unit in elementary school is often the first time students research a real person and turn that information into a report or project. When thinking about how…
FREE Martin Luther King Jr. Ideas for the elementary classroom! I love teaching about Martin Luther King Jr.: I get to introduce my students to a great person in our nation’s history, and it kicks off our biography units. I always model reading and writing a biography by writing one about Martin Luther King Jr.
This elementary Thanksgiving unit helps students understand the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving and gives them tools to make connections between those events. By the end of the…
Describe the connections between historical events is a Common Core Standard that is hard to teach! Here is how I taught this standard with the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving. Through this unit, students asked and answered questions, we made a timeline, we read great books, AND we figured out the connection between historical events.
Asking and answering questions can be hard for students! We set up a routine where students would write 6 questions and other students would answer those six questions. This was the perfect way for me to monitor whether students could ask and answer questions about any topic! Here is how we applied it to Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving history timeline activities give students a way to hold the story together across multiple read-alouds. When students can see the events arranged chronologically — from Plymouth, England to the…
Second grade teachers typically encounter landforms 2nd grade content in two places: social studies, when students learn to read and label physical maps, and science, when students study how wind…
Scaffold student writing in the content areas by providing them with word lists, a way to organize the words and sentence frames. Find out how I help my English learners and struggling writers to organize their thoughts when comparing and contrasting urban and rural environments.
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