Social Studies Focus and World History for Us All

Over the summer I have spent quite a bit of time reading, reflecting, and planning. When I realized that the school year was coming right up, I broke down my to-do list and decided to split up the content areas I teach into days. This week when I go into the school for a couple days I will be focusing on social studies. I got a head start last Friday by spending an afternoon at the university I attended in the curriculum library skimming middle school social studies textbooks.

I already know that I will be using a lot of ideas from Making History Mine, and that I want to use Kelly Gallagher's idea of Article of the Week (from Readicide and his DVD Article of the Week). I will be skimming through more of the examples of the ones he assigned to his 10th and 12th graders this year as I prepare. Even though he does this during language arts time, I will include it in my social studies curriculum. However, since I will teach both subjects, the two content areas will blend together in some aspects such as this.


I have been using my state's curriculum maps to match resources and ideas to our content standards. Since I do not have a textbook, I was excited to find World History for Us All, an on-line resource with lesson plans and supporting texts, which is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. I love the ideas behind the curriculum, as well as the three essential questions and seven key themes. It is perfect because our school is focusing on developing essential questions for each of our content areas. I am excited to use the video History of the World in Seven Minutes that is available on their home page. I still need to go through each individual lesson, but from what I have seen so far, I will use this resource a lot. The only drawback is that it is all in English, so I will not be able to use it as easily on Spanish weeks (although I can replicate the concepts in Spanish).

I am looking forward to a couple of productive days to map out my social studies curriculum more.