The Social Studies Department is committed to growing and developing students to become participants in a democratic society. Social studies aim is to enable students to understand, participate in, and make informed decisions about their world. Social studies instruction strives to provide students with the necessary skills to understand and interact with social studies strands to develop a deep understanding of their world and society.

Curriculum Components

Social Studies is a problem-solving discipline that includes a combination of historical content and processing skills. Social studies instruction provides students with problem-solving skills to address social, political, economic, and geographic concerns in real-world applications. Teachers can follow general best practices that help connect prior knowledge, build background knowledge, and make meaningful connections to make social studies instruction comprehensible to students. Instructional expectations for teaching social studies include, but are not limited to:

• Connection to real-world examples: use real-world examples to bridge concepts already known to history. 

• Visual Learning: ideas, concepts, data, and other information are associated with images and techniques. 
• Open-ended Questions: designed to encourage a full, meaningful answer using the subject’s own knowledge and/or feelings.
• Use of primary and secondary resources: A primary source provides direct or firsthand evidence about an event, object, person, or work of art.  A secondary source is any source about an event, period, or issue in history that was produced after that event, period, or issue has passed.
• Debate: a formal discussion in which opposing arguments are put forward by students in defending an issue or an idea.