ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the building blocks of activity-based lessons: lessons that involve students as historians and social scientists who learn social studies content and skills as they examine documents and are engaged in activities. It looks at ideas and strategies for stimulating students’ interest, expanding their ability to understand the world, encouraging them to think and ask questions, and making it possible for them to draw connections between different disciplines, the past and present, and the academic world and their own experiences. The most common activity in a social studies classroom is probably document analysis. Documents can be text, images, or artifacts. This chapter also includes approaches to questioning, designing activity sheets, and strategies for dealing with heterogeneous ability groups. Key concepts include activity, applications, assessment, cooperative learning, documents, document-based instruction, lesson organizers, motivation, questioning, and transition.
