Using Schell and Fisher's "Teaching Social Studies: A Literacy Based Approach" to Drive Our Integrated Unit

This chapter was very interesting to me. I had to read it a few times to understand the different meanings of the key terms: topics, themes, concepts, and big ideas. As I was reading this, I was relating it more to my personal experiences with teaching and wondering how I can make this work in my classroom. As for our integrated unit, I found some very helpful information. The book stated on page73, that we should identify what we want our children to know and be at the end of the unit. I think this helps our focus of the lesson. I will also use the topic section as we plan. Since we plan to use a building (John Wheeler House) as our focus, the section on topics will be more useful to us. Although, the themes can be useful too when we tie in our social studies themes from the National Standards.