Elementary vs. High School Social Studies

Do you remember social studies class in elementary school? How about social studies class in high school? In elementary school I remember researching people in class and having to do projects. I don't remember learning much in social studies class in elementary school. But in high school I remember so much.

In elementary school I don't remember learning much, I don't even know if we learning anything about history other than doing research on historical people.

I remember one year my teacher had assigned us to do a certain person, and we weren't really too excited on doing someone we've never heard of before. But when we did have a chance to research our person, it was kind of interesting learning about someone knew, learning how that person could have created something we use today that we may not have known. Every year in my history class all we did was research projects on historical people, that's what I remember. But one year, social studies class was a bit different. We were starting to learn about our continents and about different cultures. Now when we started to learn this, I was excited because it was something new, no more research project on historicial people. I remember when I was assigned the continent China, and we did this little, night thing, where we made poster boards about our continent, we worked on that over some weeks. And we also studied what different foods, clothing, music, languages they had. The Night of Continents, we invited our parents to see what we have studied, in class our teacher worked with us on making different foods for our parents to try. That experience was really fun, it kept . me engaged throughout the course knowing I was going to be able to cook food and invite my parents to see what I've done.

Now when I got to high school, history started to get a bit different. We rarely did projects like how we did in elementary school and of course it would be different. In one school, I remember doing everything from the textbooks, thats all. Every class we would learn a chapter, he would send us home to read the next chapter and do the review questions in the back, and when we got to class we read the chapter over and went over the review questions as a class. Even though we were assigned the review questions in at the end of the chapter, the answers are always in the book, sometimes you rarely have to read. When I transferred schools, my history teacher was a lot different. He had us doing different activities, most times we would act as if we are the president, the assistant president, judges, etc. and he would pick a topic related to today or a topic we are learning in class and we would act as if we were that person making those decisions. We always made podcasts and newspapers, have debates, so class was very creative and active. Our opinions and thoughts always got heard.

Social studies class should always be very engaging. You should never teach when your students are not engaged, motivated to pay attention, or not interested. When your students are this way they will lack the material you want them to learn. Always start class with something exciting, whether its the topic, an activity, etc. Its good to learn about our historicial figures and about past events that happened, thats why its called history. But just having your students do research projects and presenting will refrain them from actually learning the subject. Try doing different activities, that will help with that topic as well.