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Each August, prior to going back to school, all school-age students and their parents in the southeast Ohio community served by the Gallia County Health Department have an opportunity to visit the county health fair. This program, which draws 350 to 400 people each year, is a collaborative effort of the county health department, job and family services, school nurses in two local school districts, and the Gallia-Vinton Educational Service Center (ESC). Job and family services provides the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds as approved by the County Commissioners and the educational service center coordinates the event.

Students and their families living in poverty need support to reach their potential through education. In small, rural communities, such as the Appalachian area of Ohio, strong partnerships work to mutually support educators, families, and students. Educational service centers work with governmental agencies, state grants, local community non-profits, and volunteers to create programming for families. The demonstration programs described here illustrate how such programs benefit families and their children during the toddler, elementary, and middle school years.

Students used inquiry to invest folklore in their community. As part of the C3 inquiry arc students defined questions, connected folklore to a discipline, gathered data from their community and communicated information. Students' agency drove each of the projects as the students determined how much they would investigate each topic. Students explored folk art, folk construction, folk crafts, folk games, ghost stories, food, jokelore, folk medicine, and folk music. Students created projects based on their research for authentic audiences.

Students learned to perform first-person presentation to display information researched through an inquiry process. Teachers helped students learn inquiry during instructional time. Teachers, parents, and guardians worked together to support student learning in a high poverty and low educational attainment Appalachian community. The character the students selected represented democratic citizenship to the audience of friends, visitors, parents, guardians, and community members. Reading in the content area supported decision making about the difference between celebrity and democratic citizenship.

The Gallia-Vinton Educational Service Center (ESC) in Ohio, USA, gained some valuable understanding about school and family collaboration through its Treasure Your Family (TYF) program. In partnership with Gallia County Job and Family Services, Gallia County Commissioners, Gallia County Local Schools, and Gallipolis City Schools, the ESC created a Treasure Your Family program in 2021 with the goal of offering experiences that would develop stronger relations between relatives. Through the program, families could engage in a series of events resulting in incentives. The area served was a community that lies along the Ohio River in Appalachia. The first offering of the program demonstrated considerable community support from students and their families, and so the program grew substantially for the second round in the fall of 2021. This article describes the context, procedures, structure, and pitfalls and lessons learned for the TYF program.

In rural Appalachian communities of southeast Ohio, where generational poverty is high, communities and schools worked together to both create meaningful learning experiences and ensure that basic needs were met before students started the school year. Families of students who attended Summer Advantage--a 21-day summer school program for kindergarten through high school students living in an area marked by rural poverty--had an opportunity to learn more about financial literacy as they acquired materials they needed to get students ready for school. This experience offered insight about teaching economics and engaging families with the schools.

Second grade students learn about philanthropy by creating projects where they work through an inquiry process. Each student works with a group to create community-based projects that support existing local non-profits to enrich the quality of life in an area. Student action is visible through an authentic assessment event that allows students to showcase their achievements in front of the extended school community. The event demonstrates that students participate in civic education at a developmentally appropriate level. Teachers work within a yearlong theme to help students learn civic participation.

Teacher practices created experiences for students to guide their inquiry by creating opportunities to gather data through field notes. Students examined their county and gathered data from the field on a daylong investigation of their county. Students generated questions and considered their observations at multiple stops. Students learned to take field notes through drawing, gathering evidence from the landscape, and recording both facts and interpretations from the experience. Students considered movement, human interaction with the environment, and time both as continuity and as change.

The article provides information on a workshop organized by the Gallia-Vinton Educational Service Center (ESC) in Ohio, U.S. It mentions that the workshop focused on countering the arts desert in the Appalachian community by offering a four-day music camp where students learned to play instruments like drums, dulcimer, hand chimes, and guitar.

Middle school students learned about their community when they created documentaries as part of a state bicentennial celebration. Students gathered multiple primary and secondary resources and worked with community members to interview them for their perspectives through video presentations as part of the inquiry process. Students work with local history to find connections between people both past and present. Looking at institutional histories allowed students to communicate their authentic findings to the people in the community.

Classroom innovation can involve finding unique ways to present material to students. Engaging students with the material will support their understanding of the broader implications of what they learn and how it relates to their lives.

Students establish connection to location of cultures and understanding for people from the past. Students gather information through classroom procedures to examine music and artifacts. The implication of working with artifacts for the social studies field includes students getting opportunities to do critical thinking when they use the experiences they bring with them from their life into the classroom and use these to interpret the lives of people from their artifacts. Student behavior focuses on interpretation through critical thinking. Critical thinking as a part of social studies supports the idea of students becoming decision makers; students can evaluate a culture or the present by the artifacts it creates and leaves behind. Preservice teachers need experience designing discovery activities in their university methods classes; in addition, they need experience in both observing and working with children in field experiences where artifacts are used in classroom teaching. Teacher educators need to provide models of artifact instruction appropriate to primary, intermediate, and secondary students; moreover, teacher educators need to develop complex questioning strategies to guide young teachers as they help students to develop their thinking in progressively more rigorous experiences. (Contains 10 notes.)

Students in elementary gifted class use discovery to learn about life in industrial New England. Taking multiple days to analyze this topic, students use artifacts (chairs), discussion, and primary sources to explore the politics of the 1830s. They examine the workings of Hitchcockville, Connecticut, and a Massachusetts Shaker colony. Students must use evidence to see the rise of industrialism and the reactions society had to it; the chairs reflect the geography, history, economics, and politics of the Age of Jackson. Students examine a parallel Shaker community that lived and worshipped together--people who rejected the industrial age and attempted to insulate themselves from the problems of the age. During this process gifted students unite in examining two artifacts and make discipline connections demonstrating the interrelatedness of the content. The artifacts or cultural materials are dependent upon student interpretation through critical thinking. This article discusses how artifacts can be used to teach about the rise and rejection of industrialism in the young republic. Gifted students find using artifacts important because it allows them to make connections between physical objects and ideas. They can think about these ideas to make evaluations when they compare two cultures. The reactions of the two groups to the Industrial Revolution give students opportunities to critically examine unrestrained capitalism. (Contains 9 online resources and 12 notes.)

Service-learning projects help students make connections to their community and help them to think about civic participation. The projects can range from very simple short-term philanthropy to very complex direct involvement by the students across multiple years. Students learn both social problem-solving skills and academic knowledge through service-learning programs. Cemeteries hold large amounts of statistical data about the population and culture of the community. Students use this information to create knowledge about their community and interpret the data to determine more about life in the past in their area. Teachers have considered historical thinking in relationship with research done on cemeteries, and teachers use cemeteries with primary students in designing K-(what do you know?) W-(what do you want to know?) and L-(what did you learn?) experiences. In this article, the author discusses how students engaged in a civic service-learning project when they restored the Freedomland Cemetery. The students learned how they made a contribution by physically preserving the history of their community, and they learned the story of their community. (Contains 10 notes.)

In the town of Madison, Indiana, the Mayor's Office started an initiative in 2000 called the Mayor's Eagles in partnership with Edward Eagleston Elementary School, known locally as the Eagles, using the historical expertise of Historic Madison, Inc., and the resources of the Madison Public Library. Through this program staff of Historic Madison, Inc., the Junior Preservation League introduces students to historic preservation, architecture, and Madison's built environment. Students tour historic buildings and, through a look-and-learn approach, are introduced to the many facets of historic preservation. This non-traditional way to look at Madison's architecture and design integrates creative activities to create fun and interesting ways of learning about old buildings, and encourages the community to develop pro-civic attitudes and actions in youthful citizens. The students meet every fortnight after school in the spring when they walk out of their classroom and into their community to investigate, learn, and share the results of their investigations. Based on inquiry, the students work within the community to determine the history of buildings in their area. The Junior Preservation League provides an important service-learning type of program for the community. The Junior Preservation League is important for teachers and museum educators because it provides an example for elementary students to learn about democratic and citizenship education in their own communities. (Contains 11 notes and 1 figure.)

A reenactment is the recreation of a scene, time period, or event as authentically as possible by a group of people. An educational reenactment takes the in-depth cultural experience of participating in a reenactment and joins it with the educational structure of a social studies classroom. Reenactments can be as varied as historical interpretation and imagination allow. Although many family vacations have made reenactment sites their destination of their vacations, and history clubs and gifted students have flirted with reenactment, there remains great untapped potential for use of historical reenactments as a way to teach about social studies. The reenactment described in this article focused on a twenty-year period of the French colonization in America (1741-1761). The French colonies of New France and Louisiana encompassed a large portion of North America--from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed. This time period in U. S. history is relatively unexplored by textbooks, making it ideal for reenactment. This article explains a teacher-planned reenactment carried out during the school day and offers guidelines for teachers wishing to hold their own reenactments. (Contains 2 figures, 3 notes, and 12 resources.)

This article describes an extracurricular social studies enrichment program called the Clio Club. "Clio" is derived from the Greek muse of history, and the club offers a variety of activities to help students discover and interpret social studies beyond the traditional school hours. They meet after school and on weekends both at their public school and off site on field trips to learn additional content and skills that are not possible during the regular school day. The members of the club engage in learning that compliments their school studies by allowing them to go into greater depth and to engage topics the classroom would never cover in a regular curriculum. The essence of the Clio Club's activities focuses upon four types of experiences: study travel, reenactment, field experiences, and sharing information. Students learn content knowledge through investigations that they conduct based upon their study travel experiences. The format of the Clio Club adapts easily for grades three through six. The author describes how to establish the Clio Club. (Contains 11 notes.)

This article discusses extra-curricular social studies in an Open Air History Museum. Open Air History Museum, Conner Prairie Interpretive Park in Fishers, Indiana, is a cultural institution that encourages and supports talented students as they participate in an extra-curricular program. Ten-to sixteen-year-old youths "apply for jobs" as youth interpreters at Open Air History Museum, where they work to help adult or student visitors experience the site. With a professional staff of approximately 100 and over 250 part-time interpreters contributing to the operation of the private non-profit museum, Open Air History Museum is located in the suburban community adjacent to Indianapolis. Open Air History Museum presents a collection of people from a variety of social classes, including the average citizen, not just the extremes who are engaged in seasonal activities. Students find ways to supplement social studies understanding when they turn to extra-curricular social studies programs and experiences. Students may find extracurricular social studies programs after school through multiple contests. Other cultural institutions, such as historical societies, libraries, and museums, provide excellent creative extra-curricular social studies programs. (Contains 18 notes.)

This article describes a unit of study about Colonial America given in Lubbock, Texas, in which fifth grade students learn about the crafts system by becoming apprentices for a time. The students apply to apprentice with a master crafts person, a mentor, and learn some basic methods of a craft. Mentors are typically students' relatives, friends of the family, museum educators, or business representative who enjoy teaching the basics of a specific craft. Students spend three hours outside the classroom learning form their mentors. Later, they repay the mentors for their instruction with three hours of service. Students produce a craft product, and then share some off their new knowledge to their peers and to younger students. At the end of the unit of study, students have learned a new craft and have provided community service by helping their mentors. Students gain many things from the unit of study. They learn from and relate to an adult other than their usual classroom teach; they teach social studies content to their peers and younger students; they perform useful community service for someone they know; and they are recognized for their efforts. Students get to make choices in how and what they learn; they are invited to choose a topic, learn about it, and apply their knowledge in a useful way on Colonial Crafts Day. (Contains 6 notes.)

This article discusses a campaign called STIR: Stop Tobacco in Restaurants, that was started by fourth and fifth grade students. The goal was to end smoking in public places, including restaurants, bowling alleys, sports bars, and pool halls. For two years they motivated their peers, coordinated an information campaign to urge kids and adults to find out about the dangers of second-hand smoke, and they eventually succeeded in passing a city ordinance banning smoking in public places. The STIR campaign inspired student and adult adherents even outside of the community. The project helped students understand that they can work to change their community by using the legislative process. The students developed a democratic ethic that grew and matured through their experiences. The author stresses that students should have access to service-learning projects in which the focus is on improving and developing their community by doing real service and experiencing political efficacy skills. If the schools do not provide this type of experience, students need extra-curricular alternatives to provide them with crucial democratic political skills. The project provides an example to the field of gifted education of what students can and will do to learn, to make a difference, to earn the respect of peers and adults, and to make contributions to their community. (Contains 20 notes.)

Glaciers are an excellent subject for elementary social studies classes. Their effects are easy for students to model with inexpensive teaching supplies, such as sand and ice. Students can conduct research nationally with virtual field trips or locally with real field trips. The models and research can be used as starting point for a discussion of how the impact of glaciations on land had affected individuals and communities--how people encountered the land and respond to it though labor, industry, and recreation. Students use knowledge about glacial action to discover how the forces of nature changed their environment. To find out more about glacial action on land forms, student may manipulate ice and sand, use models for understanding the land, predict and question their experience, and respond with their observations. Additionally, students use models as a foundation that readies them for experience with text and serve as a mnemonic helping them to recall and interpret existing information and incorporating new information. (Contains 6 notes.)

Community festivals allow students opportunities to meet key contact people and investigate local resources. Further, the excitement of the social festival is infectious; it encourages learning among people of multiple ages in a common area. Festivals serve to define the community, transmit culture, and allow the community to participate in education. The field trip is a research activity where students gather information to be shared in the classroom with their peers. This research is directly connected to their community and their sense of place. Finally, the experience of being surrounded by a cadre of dedicated experts and seeing another type of community is exhilarating. Students learn with and from members of the community when they experience festivals. Although a festival is a good way to integrate inquiry methods into student field trips, it is not the only way to take a field trip and other types of sites would require different methods. The author suggests that social studies educators do need to promote inquiry to encourage students to hold problems as their own. Students need suggestions and limits set by teachers on where to go, what to do, and how to do it. By giving students some latitude in selecting an assignment that motivates them, teachers encourage decision-making skills through this event. (Contains 9 figures and 11 notes.)

What would happen if social studies student used spaces marked out on the floor and physical movement to learn social studies? Would such a lesson conform with the Vision of Powerful Teaching and Learning in the Social Studies? Students get out of their chairs and away from their desks to perform events within a defined space elsewhere in the room or outside. An outline refers to a carefully measured space that matchers or maps the dimensions of a thing or place from the past, such as a ship or a land claim. Kinesthetics are movements that involve the "big muscles" of the body. The use of outlines and kinesthetics can allow students engaged in concept development--to play with time and space, and to learn about human events. In these lessons, fourth grade students help to create an outline and then use kinesthetics to acquire knowledge, skills, and values. (Contains 19 notes.)

This article describes a group students in an elementary gifted class used discovery to learn about life in industrial New England. Taking multiple days to analyze this topic, students used artifacts (chairs), discussion, and primary sources to explore the politics of the 1830s. They examined the workings of Hitchcockville, CT, and a Massachusetts Shaker colony. Students used evidence to see the rise of industrialism and the reactions society had to it; the chairs reflect the geography, history, economics, and politics of the Age of Jackson. Students also examined a parallel Shaker community that lived and worshipped together--people who rejected the industrial age and attempted to insulate themselves from the problems of the age. This article also provides the benefits of learning about national and international events through the use of artifacts. (Contains 5 figures and 10 resources.)

Each year, about 70 4th- and 5th-grade students from an elementary school in an Indiana urban area participate in an extracurricular social studies enrichment program called the Clio Club. Clio is derived from the Greek muse of history, and the club offers a variety of activities to help students discover and interpret social studies beyond the traditional school hours. They meet after school and on weekends, both at their public school and off site on field trips, to learn additional content and skills that are not possible during the regular school day. The members of the club engage in learning that compliments their school studies by allowing them to go into greater depth and to engage topics they would never cover in a regular curriculum (Morris, 1997). The students who elect to join this group are interested in learning more about a particular topic, as well as furthering their educational experiences. For teachers, the Clio Club offers an opportunity to let students explore and take more ownership over their learning. While doing this, the Clio Club also offers a platform for talent development.

Students who use drama assess their work through using a science fiction essay to help them look for and make connections between times, places, people, and situations. The students then use assessment guidelines to focus their ideas, stimulate their creativity, and demonstrate minimum standards of excellence. Finally, students have access to scoring rubrics as they complete their projects.

Science teacher Don Wertz and social studies teacher Larry Taulman grew up in Johnson County and lived next to Edinburg and Camp Atterbury when it was in operation. What became known as "The Atterbury Files" began when these two teachers started gathering information for a field trip to the old army base that had been active when they were students. In 1976, they initiated interdisciplinary field trips to the base, which allowed students to use the resources of their local community as a curriculum to learn more about science and social studies. This project was important for the community because it preserved and disseminated its history. The students met a need for the community that the community had not recognized or filled. When students filled this need, they used the expertise of community historical groups, listened to local citizens, and worked to organize material that had not been explored. In an area that lacks professional historians, students contributed their best efforts to the community, and the community had an opportunity to see young people at their most altruistic.

Teachers learned knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions through spending significant amounts of time working with heritage sites as they learned more about social studies. Elementary social studies teachers engaged in teacher in-service to increase their abilities to meet geography standards. Teacher professional development that caused instructors to engage with cultural and historic sites benefited them and should be considered as well as other models of teacher in-service. Teachers used study travel opportunities to engage in geographic investigation and exploration to accomplish inquiry. Teachers determined that extended time was required to experience the place, to value it, and to harbor the disposition to teach about it; they learned in-depth content from spending time on-site, and they learned skills to extract knowledge from site through reading the landscape. Teachers encountered multiple perspectives, technology, and controversial issues through their studies of regions in the Ohio River Valley. Teachers of elementary social studies may wish to consider this type of professional development to understand a sense of place and how it relates to the curriculum they teach.

Students participate in historic preservation projects that fall along a continuum of student participation. Adults and students need to work to push more projects to be student led rather than students working for adults. A variety of example projects are presented and show how they fall on the continuum. In addition, an example of projects that resulted in being demolished is provided to show what happens when students and adults do not work effectively together.

Lessons in community building and cultural understanding are important aspects of a 21st-century education. Through such lessons, students gain the keys to societal understanding as they gain knowledge about their cultural and historical contexts, and use that understanding as a setting for exploration of deeper values, emotional experiences, and life challenges. Indiana Landmarks, a historic preservation group in this midwestern U.S. state, works to provide such understanding to children through an architecture-based camp, an ArchiCamp, using historic architecture to educate and excite children about local history and instilling stewardship of and responsibility for cultural heritage. ArchiCamp brings organizations together, reminds the collaborators of their common goals, and nurtures strong partnerships. The ArchiCamps described in this article were offered to 8- through 12-year-old students who were interested in learning more about historic preservation. Students participated in multiple types of activities, including community building, data gathering, mentoring, examining primary sources, and creating iconic representations of historic preservation projects. Students self-assessed their progress, describing their experiences, sharing their notes, and explaining their project to their parents in a portfolio-style assessment. In order to assess the program and document student engagement, educators used a Likert scale measurement of student interest in local history, the built environment, and historic architecture. They also assessed if the students found careers in those areas to be of interest. Finally, the students indicated if they felt responsibility or stewardship for their heritage. Many factors provided indications about program success.

This article explores the role of the automobile industry in the Midwest, going beyond Michigan's involvement. It highlights how small towns in the Midwest contributed to the industry by manufacturing car parts and how union activity shaped local economies. The article also discusses a website that offers teaching resources on car culture, including lesson plans, podcasts, and virtual field trips. The article concludes by emphasizing the value of professional development for social studies teachers and the importance of incorporating historic preservation and place-based learning into the curriculum. Additionally, the article discusses the impact of a teacher in-service on social studies teachers' knowledge of the automobile industry and car culture. The in-service provided teachers with resources and materials to teach about these topics, resulting in increased knowledge and a greater likelihood of teaching about them in the future. The in-service also emphasized the importance of historic preservation in relation to the auto industry. Overall, the in-service had a meaningful impact on the teachers' teaching practices and knowledge. [Extracted from the article]

Elementary students survey buildings in an extracurricular community service project to learn social studies and historic preservation. From these experiences students formed values and dispositions by engaging in a constructivist process of creating knowledge by examining their community. They gathered data, transformed it into information, and shared it with the larger community. Because students learned what community means in reality, not just reading about it, they had a different understanding of how they related to the place they called home. Examining these types of questions helped elementary students have significant experiences that helped them to connect community members with the importance of place. The built environment is the context for historic structures. Student engagement with the social studies curriculum allowed them to create investigations with architecture to broaden their understanding of their world.

Students used a compass trail to show how they could perform service to their school. When students performed service learning, they completed a real task that was needed for a grateful audience conjoined with academic content in the lesson. Students worked on the school grounds and used content from their regular curriculum while looking for real-life connections to academic applications. Students became involved in real projects that they found meaningful while making contributions to the community. Students learned about geographic tools and used those tools to accomplish their service projects. The students realized that the experience was real from their preparations, through the execution of the project, and the formative evaluation.

Eighth-grade students from three school districts in three small towns in Crosby County, Texas, received academic credit for working together with the biannual Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum summer travel education program. Each of the three districts radiate from a small town. They were within one county, and the museum was located in the county seat. The community members charged the museum with providing programming to each of the area schools. Students took two weeks during the summer to travel by school bus to participate in a program that combined the school districts and the county historical society educational programming resources. This model program provided an example of how a local museum and rural school districts worked together to provide geographic enrichment. The students traveled throughout their county, in Texas and Oklahoma, and saw sites of local interest. They camped in state parks, with the students providing their own equipment. They enrolled for this experience in their eighth-grade history class and received one-half of a high school social studies credit. The schools and the museum worked together to provide enrichment and travel opportunities for students who were interested in exploring deeper social studies content. By working together, museums supported students who were looking for cultural history experiences in an area that was very remote. An overview of the program, including the creation and execution, is presented in this article.

This article describes a lesson plan that encouraged the usage of digital tools to enhance inquiry as a key tool in teaching elementary social studies. The lesson revolved around a field trip to the home of Civil War Governor Oliver P. Morton (Centerville, Indiana). The active, investigative, and questioning nature of inquiry in social studies lends itself to gathering data through field trips where students gain academic content and improve skill development though experience learning. The lesson included usage of digital tools that assisted students in locating information out of doors, in prerecorded messages, and engaging in debates of controversial issues. The article encourages educators to take advantage of every teaching opportunity utilizing diverse teaching mechanisms, including students' phones and tablets. This access to knowledge changes the discourse style from teacher or docent as a provider of information to student as an investigator.