Back-to-School Resources!
Back-to-School Resources!
Get ready for the new school year with these back-to-school resources from Social Education, Middle Level Learning, and Social Studies and the Young Learner
Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People
The Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People is an annual project of National Council for the Social Studies and the Children's Book Council. The annual bibliography features K-12 annotated titles published in the previous calendar year that are exceptional books for use in social studies classrooms, selected by social studies educators.
See current and past lists, and a searchable database of Notable Trade Books.
Resources from NCSS Journals
Social Education
A Framework for Using Notable Social Studies Picture Books in High School
Teaching high school history with picture books can enliven social studies content, advance students’ higher-order thinking skills, and help facilitate differentiated instruction.
The 2023 Carter G. Woodson Book Award Winners
The Carter G. Woodson Book Award is presented by National Council for the Social Studies to elevate texts that accurately depict the experiences of traditionally marginalized racial or ethnic groups within the United States. The award now has a long history, nearly 50 years, in honor of distinguished scholar and activist Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson’s life-long dedication to making Black History known, visible, and valued inspires us to focus our students’ learning experiences on classroom resources that elevate the diverse voices of the American social landscape.
The 2023 Septima Clark Women in Literature Award Winners
In 2019, the National Council for the Social Studies established the Septima P. Clark Book Award. Books chosen for this honor must be nonfiction trade books and accurately reflect women’s issues, perspectives, and stories. They must be thoroughly researched, well written, and indicate originality. These are the 2023 Septima P. Clark book awardees.
Social Studies and the Young Learner
Teaching Young Learners with the C3 Framework
In this article, the authors share how a third-grade teacher supported students in crafting and researching their own inquiry questions using a process known as the Question Formulation Technique to scaffold students’ development of supporting questions. Hughes and Heckart provide the reader with suggestions and resources for supporting student-initiated inquiry.
Recognize, Ask, Do: Teaching Young Children to Act on Injustice by “ReADing” the World
In this piece, the authors unpack a heuristic developed by the Great First Eight curriculum for helping young children to recognize and act on injustice.
So We Want Kindergarteners to Argue? Developing Argumentation Skills in the Kindergarten Classroom
In this article, the author examines how the New York State Social Studies Resource Toolkit supports argument discourse in social studies and then explores a primary teacher’s curricular and instructional decisions regarding the development of children’s argumentation skills. The study provides insights into how teachers can involve some of our youngest students in authentic, inquiry-based social studies learning that fosters argument discourse.