The writers of the new Kentucky Social Studies Standards share that "In an ever-changing and increasingly interconnected world, students must be life-long critical thinkers and questioners who can undertake multidimensional, complex reasoning."

The new standards go a long way in moving kids from memorization of facts to encouraging them to think like historians. Under the new framework the writers share that "Kentucky students actively will engage with the social studies concepts, ideas and practices needed to participate in and navigate the community, state, nation and world in which they live."

In designing the standards, the writers "intended to convey the importance of both conceptual knowledge and understanding within four disciplinary strands in social studies (civics, geography, economics and history) and the development of the inquiry practices of questioning, investigating, using evidence and communicating conclusions. Grade-level and grade-span concepts within each of the four disciplinary lenses provide the specificity, content and context for the appropriate application of the practices. The complexity of the standards within the concepts and practices progresses from kindergarten through high school."

The day of the stand alone geography unit where students memorize states and capitals is behind us. In considering the standards, it is critical to think of the disciplinary strands as parts of a working whole. As students consider causes and effects and construct meaning, they should do so through the scope of all four strands: civics, geography, economics and history.

The standards focus on inquiry. In fact, the writers share that "students engage in the inquiry practices – questioning, investigating, using evidence and communicating conclusions. Students use these practices to acquire, refine and extend knowledge and understanding of key social studies concepts within the four disciplinary lenses of civics, economics, geography and history."

As you redesign units to meet these new standards, it would be important to consider how you will wrap your content in inquiry. Students begin with questioning, then investigate the four strands to eventually communicate evidence based conclusions.

Below you will find a collection of resources to help you in redesigning your units. As always, I'm here to help! You can also find my curated resources at my website.

As you consider what standards you are going to build your unit around, you might do it in a number of different ways.

You might choose a standard from either Civics, Economics, Geography or History and then work to "bundle" standards together that make sense. You might also go straight to the Communicating Conclusions standards in the document and then decide which standards under the disciplinary strands would support the communicating conclusions standard.

In the standards document, the section "What would this look like in practice" for each grade level provides us with a good example of how you might bundle the standards. JCPS has also worked hard to provide us with an example of how those standards could be bundled.

It's good to know that each of the four disciplinary strands is color coded throughout the document, and that below the standards there are clarification statements to consider.

The unit planning template below might give you an idea for how to organize your thinking and is color coded to match the standards.

As you plan, you might try to include at least one standard from each of the four disciplinary strands and remember that students are engaging in inquiry.

You can force a copy of the planner here if you would like.

It's hard to develop a unit from scratch, and chances are to get something really good, you're not going to find exactly what you need on Teachers Pay Teachers.

You might consider exploring units at the C3 Inquiries site. This is a good place to look for inspiration. Use the filters to find examples for your grade level. As a tip, be sure to explore the units for the grade level above and below yours because many of the units cross over and may be more appropriate in a different spot based on Kentucky standards.

Don't miss clicking where it says PDF to get resources, which often include some sort of source material to work with.

As I find more information, I'll be curating it here.

Your librarians are experts in inquiry. They are working primarily with the Super 3 for grades K-2 and the Big 6 for grades 3-5. These models support the inquiry practices outlined in the new standards, and there are plenty of resources available for them.

You may also find this article from Edutopia about Guided and Students Driven Inquiry Useful and here's an even deeper look at the Guided Inquiry model from Carol Kuhlthau.

We might even work together to develop an inquiry based digital notebook that students can use to help guide their work. I have tons of examples we can work off of!

You might find that collecting resources for students to explore in their inquiry is not easy, especially, since so many of the primary sources just aren't easily accessible for an elementary aged student. For our youngest students you might focus on collections of maps and images, and then as students get older show them samples of primary source documents with transcripts so they can read it.

Primary Sources

As you consider primary sources, you might start with resources curated by the Kentucky Historical Society. They have linked many images and maps directly to the standards. You next might want to explore the Library of Congress. Here you can find maps, images, video and even books that are in public domain. Check out the video below for some search tips. There is also Life magazine photos and the National Archives. You can access those links here.

Secondary Sources

With our iPads you have access to a ton of secondary sources through apps like Epic! and databases like PebbleGO.

Don't forget to also consult Discovery Education and KYVL though Classlink. I have compiled quick searches of some favorite periodicals on my website here. Scroll down to get to issues of Time for Kids, Cobblestone and Scholastic News. For more information on how to use that feature check out this blog post on finding High Quality Secondary Sources on KYVL.

Another source I'm finding to be a great go-to is CommonLit. Here you can search by topic and limit your results to your grade level. I love the text pairings they provide. For example a search of Colonial America for 3-4th grades yields an article about the Lost Colony of Roanoke with discussion questions and quiz and text pairings that includes a more modern example and a primary source address of Chief Powhatan to John Smith. Sometimes you may even find some fun historical fiction.

Email: heidi.neltner@fortthomas.kyschools.us
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/heidinelt/home?authuser=0
Twitter: @heidinelt