Our incredible Elementary Social Studies Design team is midway through their resource selection process to provide schools with grade level appropriate supplementals to support the new Colorado Academic Social Studies Standards.
Knowing that our new standards are steeped in robust 21st Century learning skills, we prioritized the types of resources most critically needed. We carefully selected rich text and digital materials that can guide student inquiry into history, economics, civics, and geography content.
A strong social studies curriculum is grounded in rich text, essays, speeches, opinion pieces, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles as well as resources that visually display information like maps, charts, tables, infographics and graphs. The inclusion of multimedia like photos, videos, graphics and other images allow an educator tools to increase background knowledge, inquiry, and robust discussion – and opportunity for written response.
Students should have abundant opportunities to engage in the close reading of these texts and write in direct repines to high quality questions.
“The predominant mode for such close reading, discussion, and writing should be some form of argument, such as having students support claims with evidence as they analyze, explain, and research topics they’re studying. Only this will ensure that they’re college and career ready.”
Smoker, M. (2011) Curriculum Now. Kappan. (93) 3. p. 71
Beginning next fall, we will ensure that every elementary classroom teacher of social studies has access to a projector and the following digital content that warehouse primary documents, video clips, rich text, supplemental lesson plans:
- World Book Encyclopedia Online
- World Book Social Studies Power
- World Book Early Peoples
- BrainPop Jr.
- BrainPop
- Discovery Education
In addition, schools will acquire leveled text sets aligned with grade level social studies content in the area of history, economics, civics, and geography. These text sets are aligned with Fountas & Pinnell levels, which will allow them to be easily integrated into school leveled reading libraries.
The first shipment of the texts were delivered to schools in February. The second shipment of texts will take place in May, prior to the end of this school year.
Other texts that will be included will be teacher resource texts, anchor texts for read alouds, and various supplementary materials to support content integration with an emphasis in literacy.
