Creating Social Scientists

On the first day of my last six weeks summer session I entered my class on integrating social studies and the arts and I was really excited. I loved social studies as a kid! I had a great teacher convince me that history was like a mystery and that anyone who wanted to be an archeologist could be just by asking questions and looking for answers. I was never very good with names and dates, but I loved the idea of uncovering history. I was shocked to find out during that first class how many people had bad experiences during social studies! So many people in class said that they either had no real memories of their social studies classes or they thought it was boring and uneventful. This discussion made my realize that it was going to be very important for me to pass my love for social studies onto my students.
Throughout the six weeks session I have learned the importance of creating relevance during social studies instruction by integrating the content strands including geography, history, civics and economics into other subjects like language arts, science, math and the arts. For some students, this makes the topics more relevant and, in our day of EOGs, gives more time for these important topics.
I have also learned the importance of making these subjects come to life for students like my teacher did for me. This takes planning and creativity that moves students out of their textbooks and outdated videos and into a place where they can find relevance between social studies and their lives. I think this means that teachers need to take the time to get to know their students' interests and hobbies and find ways to help students see that people in the past and in other areas of the world had similar interests and hobbies.
Since I decided that I wanted to become a teacher, teaching social studies is one of the things that I have been the most excited about. It is also one of the main reasons that I want to teach fourth grade. The history of North Carolina is really interesting to me and I look forward to sharing that interest with my students. These past six weeks have done nothing but strengthen my excitement about teaching social studies and I am looking forward to incorporating some of the new ideas that I have gained from this class and from my textbooks and research.