Great social studies lessons help students think beyond themselves to understand that the world is more complex than they think it is, and that simplistic explanations are always incomplete, and often wrong. These lessons are bread and butter of high school history teachers but elementary school teachers, whose teaching assignments also include ELA, Math, and Science, find these lessons more difficult to teach. It’s much easier to stick with the standard social studies online package or textbook lessons that have them teaching students facts to remember.
Here’s a simple lesson that capitalizes on a mistake in TCI’s Social Studies Alive Regions of Our Country. It takes less than 10 minutes of teacher time to prepare and it guaranteed to prompt interesting and absorbing thoughts to get students questioning their assumptions – even in 4th grade.
The lesson starts with the teacher telling the students that they found a mistake in the textbook, which helps, if served the right way, to build the team spirit of “us” (teachers and students as one team trying to understand the world) and “them” (people who write and publish textbooks for school). TCI’s simplistic definition of Geography as “the study of the Earth”, doesn’t include people. Social Studies explores how people live their lives as individuals and in groups – the study of the Earth without people isn’t social studies. Showing how people are incorporated into the definitions of Geography by National Geographic and the National Council for Geographic Education allows the teacher to flesh out this definition and show how lateral reading works without naming it or describing it.
The discussions that follow use TCI’s explanation of “natural features” (land, water, plants, and animals) and “human features” (towns, roads, bridges and dams). That seems simple enough. Contrasting a picture of Mount Rainer with the Sydney Opera House on a slide makes the distinction between natural and human features easy to understand and visualize. It also allows teachers to insert the metric “natural features would be here even if humans were not here” to help students understand the difference between natural features and human features. But that measurement tool is ultimately subversive.
The next slide takes the thought just one step further – a field of flowers can be a “natural feature”, they would be there even if humans were not, but could also be a “human feature”, because they were planted by humans. A field of flowers can be both a natural and human feature.
The photo of a forest fire in the next slide gets students going in different directions. Forest fires happen naturally, but they are also the result of individual human action or neglect. Was the fire started by a tossed cigarette, or a campfire incorrectly extinguished? Was the first intentionally set? Or was the fire caused by lightening? What about drought? What about climate change resulting from human action that makes the forest environment much more combustible? Experienced teachers can make a lot from the student comments, questions and observations that come from these picture prompts.
The lesson ends with Niagara Falls, which seems at first to be a strictly natural feature of the Earth. Students may mention tourist platforms to see the falls, and the lights under and around it – but it would be easy to get students to agree that the waterfalls themselves are natural features. Until, they learn that the rate at which that water is falling is determined by a Treaty between the United States and Canada and controlled by dams in the Great Lakes region.
Closing the lesson out with a written exit ticket or brief pair-share discussion with a partner could formalize the understanding that the difference between human features and natural features is a little trickier than we think.
At the cost of a little more than ten minutes to copy and customize the presentation and questioning sequence for their students, teachers can easily show them that nothing is as simple as it first seems, and thinking about the world makes it more intelligible.