Was wandering if any of you do anything for social studies? I know it’s not a big part of CM method but do you guys ever throw in any social studies and what do you do?
It kind of goes along the line of what area you are studying and when. If you are studying Gen-Deut. You get the geography of the time and era of Ancient Egypt. When you get further into Europe you get an idea for the culture of that era and time. When you get to the U.S History you can go over the culture of the U.S. and how we broke away from the European culture. If you are doing a study continent by continent you sort of pic up the culture and era of the time studied. I bought a book “World Explorer, people , places, and culture.” It really helped me show my children the culture of today and how it has changed. You may like this book for a more indepth study of all the cultures of the World.
From Wikipedia: At the elementary school level, social studies generally focuses first on the local community and family.
I don’t worry about this as a separate subject. We’ve done fieldtrips to the fire station, police station, etc. I think many aspects in the younger years are common sense things that come up in every day life. We study history and geography, and as they get older aspects of government/politics/worldview. We try to encourage our kids to be loving family members to each other and reach out and help others as we can. Hopefully I’m not missing anything, but it really doesn’t concern me to have a separate course for this:) Gina
“Social Studies” is not a real subject. It was made up by education bureaucrats who didn’t want to teach actual content to children. You need nothing extra for it. You’ll be studying plenty of REAL subjects like history, geography, economics and government as the years go by. All you need to do to cover what early elem. considers “social studies” is go out and live. Your kids will figure out who the policeman, the mailman and the fireman are without a curriculum.
Well, the way I think of it, social studies is made up of many subjects, it’s not really it’s own subject. I tend to agree with Bookworm in this, though I live in Canada and things are a little different here. A lot of the reasons behind things are similar, though.
I went to a small private, christian school when I was a kid and social studies actually refered to a group of subjects. Sort of like language arts encompasses grammar, writing, reading, spelling, etc. Social studies was made up of history, geography, cultures, citizenship, etc. I’m not so sure they did a great job actually teaching all of those subjects. Some a little better than others, but they were all considered part of “social studies”. So, these things are actually covered using CM pretty well. Well, citizenship is mostly just common sense stuff that you would train through character training anyways as an above poster mentioned. I don’t really think you need to be concerned about it, either.
Yeah, my friend looked at a neighbor’s (public school) 4th grade history/social studies book. It had just one paragraph about Geo. Washington, and all this info. on what a bus driver does, etc. I’d much rather have my child read real books about famous people in history and just tell them that at bus drive drives a bus:) Gina
Thinks for breaking things down for me and helping me have a different perspective on things! I have to undo ALOT that public school did to me. We are gonna be visiting some different places and meeting different kinds of places on field trips so I consider that part of social studies! I love how much freedom there is in CM method
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