4 Ways to Make Social Studies Lessons Engaging

Kirsten 0:00

This is the social studies teacher podcast a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know if you southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Hi, there, and welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast Happy Fourth of July. If you're listening to this in real time, today's topic is four ways to make social studies lessons engaging. We know that teaching social studies can be rewarding if you let it. But it can also be challenging to find those times and resources to create the engaging lessons that you might want to as a teacher, you want to make sure your students are learning about history and geography and culture in a way that is informative. And of course, interesting. We do not want to be those teachers that we probably grew up with, with those textbooks in front of us reading passages and pages of boring history. So we want to make it fun, we want to make it a little bit more interesting than what we probably grew up with. So today I'm going to be sharing with you four strategies to help make social studies lessons a little bit more engaging, and effective. These are ways that have worked for me. So I'll be sharing with you a few examples in my own experience as well.

The first one is incorporating current events. One way to make social studies lessons more engaging, is to incorporate events that are relevant to what's happening in the world around us or in our community. This can help students see the relevance of what they are learning, and also make connections to the world and state and cities around them. You can start by having students read news articles, or watch video clips that are appropriate to the grade level that are related to those topics that you're teaching. Then you can have them discuss and analyze those events in class as a whole group or in small groups, however you want to do it. This can also be a really great opportunity to teach critical thinking skills and just have that immediate literacy knowledge. One of the things I did during our morning meetings each day a few years ago, was a current events segment. After our question of the day, we would do some current events. This wasn't every single day but this was pretty regular, especially if I just didn't have a lot of time to plan a really big activity, something I wanted to do Super Easy was just let's go on my on news. This was something that our district had as a subscription. And so we could log on and we can see what's happening in the world, just different events. We I remember there was an article about the presidential election because that was when that was happening and just kind of learning about the different candidates. And I think I remember there was a picture of both of the candidates when they were younger. And that was fun for the kids to look at. Another place that you could look is time for kids. This was something we incorporated in our stations for fifth graders. And we even use them as assignments, students would read the Time for Kids magazine, and time for kids had a printable activity that went along with it, where they would be looking in different sections and articles and answer those questions.

All right. The second way to make social studies engaging is using technology to your advantage. Technology is a great tool for adding engagement to social studies lessons. Think about using interactive websites or videos, using virtual field trips to bring subject matter to life. Additionally, using educational apps or games can make learning more fun and interactive for students. Just be sure to vet any technology you use for the appropriateness and effectiveness. Something we did that was really cool. Were web quests, I would pull a website for students to copy and paste. And they had questions that would go along with it. And it was just related to the social studies topic that we were talking about. I remember doing one on the Oregon Trail, westward expansion, you can really do a web quest on anything. And actually, I do have a lot of web quests in my TPT store and in my membership, about different social studies topics. I've got different holidays, I've got different events in history, I've got different people. So there's so many different web quests. So if that's something that seems a little less daunting, it definitely is, it's super easy. You just have the students go to a special website. And they're going to look through that web page, article, or web page, and they're going to answer certain questions in my WebQuest. I additionally have the web quests and extension activities related to the topic and those extension activities change, sometimes they'll get they'll get another source and they might have to look up 10 different other New Year's celebrations and what people do around the world. There's another one about a biography for Milton Hershey and Benjamin Banneker. Some other technology that you could use is just different virtual simulations or tours online. Nearpod is a really cool resource, it's free, you can sign up for it. And basically, this is not just in social studies, but in other topics, we were able to pull different lessons. And the cool part about Nearpod is that you could complete it as a whole group, everybody's on their device, you can either do it where everybody is on the device, and they're interacting with it, they answer the quiz questions, they can type in their answers, they can draw their answers, and you pace it, it's all paste together. So when you click on the next slide, they also go to the next slide. There's also different things that you know, to engage the students where they're looking at some type of place in the world, or some type of like, I remember when that they were in a toy store, and they were looking around. So there's really cool things on Nearpod, I definitely recommend using that. It's highly engaging for the students, it's really good for review, and maybe you're just talking, you're introducing a social studies topic, you can always go on Nearpod and type something in more times than not, you'll find that topic.

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Alright, the fourth way to make social studies lessons engaging is to use real world examples. This could be current events, of course, historical events, or even personal experiences. By connecting the content to real life situations, students are more likely to be interested and invested in the lesson, you can always use primary sources such as letters, diaries, photographs, to bring history to life and make it more relatable to students. Something that I loved sharing with my students is about how my family has a Texas historical marker, and also a museum. It's in the historical marker database. This was my great, great grandfather and his wife, this is a pretty cool piece of history that my family has. And I know a little bit more about who my family was just based off of that. So something that is definitely true is that part of my family has been in Texas for many years before Texas was even considered part of the United States. And so that's kind of cool that I love to share with students. And it's kind of just a little piece of history and a piece of me that I like to engage my students with.

All right, I have one bonus way, you can make social studies lessons engaging. And that is through guided notes, something that I really liked doing was completing guided notes with my students I'd have we were required to have interactive notebooks. And so students had to keep track of their notebooks with the table of contents. And we would anytime we have a new entry would write that we would write down that topic in the table of contents, we'd put it into the next available page, glue it in and take notes. And I'd always have some type of slideshow, it took a lot of time to prep. Just because we didn't have you know, very rarely we would have a specific topic that covered all of what we needed to. So more times than not, I had to create those myself, I've got a sample of five guided notes, one is partially filled out and one is completely filled out. And it's something you can easily fill in with your students. These are really low prep and easy to use, you can use them as anchor charts or reference guides, the possibilities are pretty endless. And lesson plans are included with each of those five different guided notes. So if that's something you're interested in, you can go to the southern teach.com forward slash social studies to learn more.

So to recap those social studies, lessons that are engaging. Number one, make sure to utilize current events. Make sure also to use technology to your advantage. Number three, make it interactive and fun. And number four, use real world examples. And then I guess throwing in that last one, make sure to try using those free guided notes.

All right, well, that is the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do happen to love these episodes, I would love it if you could subscribe, leave a review screenshot your favorite episode so far and tag me on Instagram. I'd love to share that and just kind of see how you're loving this podcast. so far. Well, that is the end. I hope to talk to you again next week. I will see you around. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.

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