Packed with activities, teaching strategies, and the latest on the constructivist approach, this text demonstrates how to use developmentally appropriate strategies to help students construct important social studies ideas and skills. Building on the success of the first edition, Social Studies for the Elementary and Middle Grades fosters students development through powerful social studies learning. The text discusses flexible strategies for teaching today's diverse learners, the structure of the knowledge to be learned, how to help students reconstruct present ideas, and how to translate theory and recent research into lesson plans and units. Constructivist teaching using guided inquiry is the focus of every chapter. Each chapter begins with an exploratory activity that lets students bring up their prior knowledge on the chapters topic and challenges them to recognize where it is insufficient. Then, the chapter moves into the more teacher-guided phase where students find explanations and explanatory activities. Lastly, each chapter involves students in an expansion phase where applications of the main ideas of the chapter are related to other contexts.