ABSTRACT
Although I am an advocate of studentcentered, activity-based, lessons, I do not believe there is only one way to teach a social studies lesson, or that it is desirable to always teach the same way. A strength of the activitybased approach is that the types of activities are very different. They include analyzing primary source documents, discussions, graphing
and mapping, singing and dancing, dramatics, or creating cartoons, posters, and poems. What the activities have in common is that they all involve students in learning by doing. Variety
in instructional methods helps keep students interested, and flexibility in lesson design allows teachers to take into account the dynamic of a particular class.
