Teaching Curriculum For Social Studies

This area is designed to assist teachers who are creating either a full curriculum or single lesson in the content area of Social Studies. You have to see our full social studies and history workbooks too. Teachers rave about them! Everything is freshly created.

Lesson Plans

Worksheets

Teacher Resources

Printables

Rubric Packs

Graphic Organizers

Elections and Voting

Explorers

Native Americans

U.S. Constitution

U.S. Presidents

50 States of America

$Inventors$ Inventors and Inventions

Women's History

World Leaders

Social Studies Content

Teacher Sites

Everything History

Basic Social Studies Skills: Discover Humans

Social studies is one very broad field that interests some people as it entails studying human behavior and trends. It enables one to understand deeper how the human brain works and consequently understand why people behaves in such a way. Social studies is the softer domain of science that deals more on the behavioral aspect of humans as opposed to say, biology that seeks to discover the composition of the human body. Social studies is an interesting subject as human behavior is indeed very hard to understand and predict. People's mood changes every minute and the way their mind works changes every minute as well. We hardly know what's inside the brain of humans and what goes on in there. But social studies is not entirely all about the human behavior as it also include history and geography. Both are still very much connected to human lives but more on about external factors that affect humans. If you seek to understand human behavior, there are basic social studies skills you need to learn to be able to fully exploit your knowledge and be able to understand such a complex species.

Observational skills. As a social studies student, you must be very observant to predict trends and human behavioral patterns. This is one of the basic social studies skills students need to master had they chosen to go into the field of social studies. They must be keen observers of human behaviors to predict trends and patterns so as to be able to devise rules and regulations people will respond to due to such behavior.

Communication and interpersonal skills. This is among the most important basic social studies skills students will ever learn in school. Since they will be dealing with all sorts of people all the time communication is very important. They have to be able to translate well to other people in order for them to extract all the necessary information they need for their studies. Not many people are good communicators thus this is a skill only the privileged are given the opportunity to learn and practice. Interpersonal skills come hand in hand with communication as students will learn how to relate well to other people if they learn both skills. In order for you to communicate well to other people whom you barely even know, you must hone first your interpersonal skills so as to effectively communicate words, phrases, and sentences to other people without causing any damage.

Reading and interpreting tables, charts and graphs. This is also among the basic social studies skills every student should learn. Mapping and predicting human behavioral patterns entail having to tabulate and make lots of charts and graphs in order for one to make conclusions. Charts, tables and graphs summarize information you have gathered and such tools will be very helpful instruments in your prediction of trends and patterns. Such instruments will help you understand human behavior even more. They can also be used to forecast future trends starting from historical events and discover certain patterns and trends that will eventually lead you to a conclusion. It is important to be able to read and interpret tables, charts and graphs as they all summarize quantitative and qualitative data, both of which are used in social studies.

These are the three basic social studies skills every student should learn. They are important not just in pursuing a career in social science but in our everyday situations as well. Communication and interpersonal skills is the key to building a harmonious relationship with other people while being observant allows one to gather information and make inferences about the complex waves that is the human brain. Charts, tables and graphs will forever be a part of social studies to interpret and predict thus all are included in the basic social studies skills students have to master.

Social StudiesTeacher Web Sites

Check out these fantastic Social Studies and History web sites. They were brought to our attention by over a baker's dozen of Social Studies teachers.