An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children

Olivia N. Saracho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138339682
• eBook ISBN: 9780429804687
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children, Second Edition explores how to integrate play across the curriculum, helping teachers develop their early childhood curriculum using developmentally and culturally appropriate practice. Distinguished author Olivia N. Saracho offers a theoretical framework for understanding the origins of an early childhood play-based curriculum and illuminates how young children learn and understand concepts in a social and physical environment. This second edition has been fully updated throughout and its comprehensive coverage has been expanded with entirely new sections on technology and social media, cultural differences in play, and teaching English language learners and students with disabilities. Packed with vignettes, activities, and practical examples, this text is essential reading for pre-service teachers seeking appropriate theoretical practices for designing and implementing a play-based curriculum.

Section IV

Educational Perspectives

Chapter 7

Social Studies—Play Learning Experiences

Education in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity in life.

(Dewey, 1916, p. 3)

A major educational goal is to transmit culture or a way of life to young children. Social studies helps them to gain the knowledge, skill, attitudes, and values that are required to persevere in society. It focuses on the people and their interactions with others and the whole environment to impart a way of life while, at the same time, it builds the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values children need to change and improve their way of life. Social studies embraces all disciplines from the social science field. Everything concerning the nature of people and the world, the heritage of the past, and all of contemporary living is considered to be social studies (Seefeldt et al., 2013). The NCSS, the most prevalent professional organization for social studies educators in the world, describes social studies as:

… the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.

(NCSS, 2010, p. 6)

Social studies promotes the children’s civic competence including the knowledge, intellectual processes, and dispositions that they need to be active and engage in groups and public life. Civic competence helps children learn the ideas and values of democracy. It also helps them develop the ability to use knowledge about their community, nation, and world. Young children need to become knowledgeable, skillful, and committed to democracy so as adults they can help sustain and improve their democratic way of life as members of a global community (NCSS, 2010).

Young children need to be provided with purposeful and meaningful learning experiences that are challenging, of high quality, and developmentally appropriate. Social studies education needs to be integrated into the children’s curriculum for them to become effective participants in a democratic society. They need to become independent and cooperative to solve problems that focus on complex social, economic, ethical, and personal concerns. Young children need the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to become informed and thoughtful members in society. The social studies curriculum needs to focus on concepts from the four core social studies disciplines: Civics, economics, geography, and history.

Young children who are in a strong social studies program learn to develop a crucial foundation to participate as citizens throughout their lives. Both America and the world are quickly changing and people are living in a far more multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual, multireligious and multicultural context. Early childhood teachers need to be prepared to value, and to teach, a far more diverse group of young children and their families than they did in the past. Social studies is essential in the early childhood curriculum, because it prepares young children to understand and participate effectively in an increasingly complex world.

Young children need to be provided with opportunities to explore the variety and complexity of human experience through a dynamic and meaningful education. They need to be grounded in democratic principles and immersed in developmentally appropriate democratic strategies to obtain the basic skills that prepare them to respectfully and intelligently work together in a country and world marked by globalization, interdependence, human diversity, and societal change. The purpose of this chapter is to describe early childhood education pioneers in social studies, contemporary early childhood influences, the program, curriculum knowledge, play learning centers, prop boxes, field trips, museums, and thematic units in social studies.

Social Studies Early Childhood Education Pioneers

Several early childhood education pioneers proposed innovative and meaningful social studies approaches for young children. Patty Smith Hill, who was influenced by John Dewey, believed that children’s social experiences are the basis for knowledge. Dramatic play themes can help children learn about the world. Children role play their experiences with their family, friends, and community. Such experiences can be repeated, interpreted, and expanded (Hill, 1913).

Another early childhood pioneer, Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1934), developed a program where the young children’s experiences in their personal environment helped them to learn basic concepts about geography. She included concrete materials that would help young children understand abstract ideas that provided them with sophisticated knowledge. Maria Montessori (1912) also created concrete materials to help young children understand abstract ideas. She used time lines to help young children place historical events within a temporal framework. For example, children could understand the relationship between events within the framework of historical time when they measured distance with a rope to represent time. Children were able to get a sense of geography when they worked with map puzzles.

In the 1930s, progressive educators like John Dewey suggested that social studies be the basis for activity-based learning using children’s interests. Dewey advocated that learning required first-hand experiences and various instructional resources. He believed that developmentally appropriate learning and teaching activities need to help children go from familiar to unknown daily life experiences (Dewey 1916). For farming communities, children can plant wheat in the classroom, observe the process of the plant’s growth, and document its progress, whereas city children can learn about the work of the milk-wagon driver and the chimney sweep (Mindes, 2015).

Contemporary Early Childhood Influences

In the 1960s, Jerome Bruner’s (1960) work supported the child-centered curricular and instructional approach for social studies. Bruner suggested a spiraling curriculum to teach children social studies topics, like democracy, in a developmentally appropriate way. For example, young children could establish classroom rules to keep order and be fair to everybody (Mindes, 2015). Bruner’s approach contributed to inquiry-based teaching that became the major way to teach social studies. He also emphasized learning by doing in the social studies learning process.

The Social Studies Program

In social studies, young children study the political, economic, cultural, and environmental components of societies in the past, present, and future. The social studies content includes the areas of history, economics, geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, and psychology. These rich, interrelated disciplines are essential to the background of thoughtful citizens. Pace, a university professor who has a point of view that is widely held by social studies educators, believes that:

depth of historical, political, and cultural understanding is essential if this democracy is to survive and thrive. Powerful social studies teaching helps students develop enduring understandings in the core content areas of civics, economics, geography, and history, and assures their readiness and willingness to assume citizenship responsibilities. Powerful social studies learning leads to a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry that can sustain and build on democratic traditions.

(Pace, 2007, p. 27)

For young children and all age groups, social studies serve several purposes. The social studies curriculum provides them with the knowledge and understanding of the past that is important for them (a) to manage the present and plan for the future; (b) to help them to understand and participate effectively in their world; and (c) to communicate their relationship to other people and to social, economic, and political institutions. According to the NCSS, the purpose of social studies for young children is:

… to establish a learning environment and instruction to enable each student to understand, participate, and make informed decisions about their world. Social studies explain students’ relationships to other people, to institutions, and to the environment. It equips them with the knowledge and understanding of the past necessary for coping with the present and planning for the future. It provides them with the skills for productive problem solving and decision making, as well as for assessing issues and making thoughtful value judgments. Above all, it integrates these skills and understandings into a framework for responsible citizen participation, whether in the school, the community, or the world.

(NCSS, 2019, pp. 1–2)

Social studies content offers young children the ability to be able to effectively solve problems, make decisions, assess issues, and make thoughtful value judgments. Most importantly, it assists young children to integrate these abilities and understandings into a framework for responsible citizen participation in their play group, the school, the community, or the world (NCSS, 2019).

A social studies curriculum uses strategies and activities for children to participate in important ideas and helps them (a) to relate what they are learning to what they already know and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Section I Play in the Context of Early Education
• Section II Theoretical Perspectives
• Section III Educational Foundations
• Section IV Educational Perspectives
• References
• Index