Every Day Successes: Powerful Integration of Social Studies Content and English-Language Arts.

Instructional time for social studies has been reduced nationwide, particularly in the elementary grades. Yet states continue to promote content standards in history, economics, civics, and geography for young learners. Purposeful integrative content that is appropriate for grades K-6, while sometimes difficult to find, seems to many elementary school teachers to be a favored approach. Research suggests that instructional time devoted to elementary social studies is minimal at best.1 There also seems to be a discernible trend that teachers are finding ways to incorporate social studies throughout the school day, by carefully integrating content. Recognizing these realities, the author team (a classroom teacher and two teacher educators) has worked together for the past three years to document and report through publications and conference presentations how fifth grade teacher Mary Ledbetter finds time to plan and implement highquality social studies instruction through content integration. We wanted to know how she does the work of social studies in her classroom and what high-impact strategies she uses to connect social studies content to other content in a very full curriculum. We have found that purposeful content integration is an effective means of providing young children with rich learning experiences in the social studies. This article features the successful integration techniques that Mary uses as she and her fifth grade students work together to learn social studies through integrated instruction.