International children’s picture books provide windows and mirrors for children and allow them to consider issues of fairness, justice, equity, diversity, and the common good as they build their nascent citizenship skills.

In this article, the authors highlight four children’s picture books that can be used to discuss gender diversity with young children in social studies.

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.

Tina M. Ellsworth and Toni Gates center their article around stories of Black joy, agency, and resistance of Black Kansas Citians. Ellsworth and Gates’ collaboration demonstrates how educators can effectively construct partnerships between schools and grassroots organizations. The authors of this piece will guide educators in ways to find local Black history in their cities, show how to draw on the IDM example, and provide lesson suggestions.

Melanie McCormick and Alycia West implore educators to engage in thoughtful conversations about transnational adoption in “Seen but not Seen: Supporting Transracial and Transnational Adoptees in the Classroom.” The authors draw on their stories of growing up as transracial and transnational adoptees as well as their research on children’s literature on adoption to provide instructional guidelines and resources for teachers to teach about transnational adoption.

The authors provide an overview of teaching war and explore ways to situate these notions in the elementary classroom. As part of this discussion, they offer a guide for selecting appropriate texts for a thematic text set for children involving issues of war and peace.

“The Fresh Market: Connecting Content, Children, Families, and the Community,” outlines the “fresh market project” and lays out an argument for a cross-curricular approach to teach social studies in a preschool classroom. The authors outline a process in which teachers met weekly to think of ways to embed content in science, technology, reading, engineering, art, math, and social studies in an effective and engaging manner. Their narrative highlights the power of interdisciplinary work with young children, with an emphasis on social studies as the connecting thread.

In an effort to establish and expand abilities related to perspective, three elementary education professors collaborated with a trio of local fifth-grade teachers to develop and teach a lesson on the topic. In this article, the authors begin with the description and sequencing of the lesson, continue with an explanation of book categories and some student responses from the read aloud, and finally, offer a description of the culminating writing activity with some sample student responses.