Discover how to engage K-8 students with the big ideas in North Carolina social studies using News-O-Matic. This session will explore practical strategies for teaching key topics like historical turning points, human-environment interaction, civic responsibility, and economic systems. Learn how News-O-Matic’s interactive tools and resources foster critical thinking and inquiry-based learning while connecting students to North Carolina’s history, geography, and culture in meaningful ways. Leave with tools to align lessons with standards and inspire your students to think critically about the world around them.

This session will explore the development of civic literacy curriculum materials designed specifically for K-5 classrooms. Participants will learn how to engage young students in understanding core democratic principles, active citizenship, and community participation. We’ll highlight key strategies for creating age-appropriate resources that empower teachers to foster critical thinking, empathy, and civic responsibility from an early age. You will leave the session with K-5 civic literacy resources that are ready for use across North Carolina, providing practical tools and insights to bring civic education to life in elementary classrooms.

Celebrate world cultures with even the youngest students as you easily integrate these rich resources and ideas into your elementary classroom. Hands-on, inquiry-based Social Studies activities keep students engaged and using higher order thinking skills. We will help you enrich every content area, build background knowledge, pique curiosity, and have fun! You can use what we share to build a foundation for lifelong learning, empathy, respect, collaboration, communication, and inquiry. You may even take away a means to get your own passport stamped!

This session explores how elementary social studies educators can effectively integrate WIDA Standards to support multilingual learners in accessing and engaging with social studies content. Through hands-on activities, participants will analyze social studies tasks, adapt materials, and create learning objectives that align with both academic content standards and language development goals. Also, will examine strategies for scaffolding instruction to build academic language while fostering critical thinking and inquiry-based learning. The session will highlight examples of using WIDA’s Proficiency Level Descriptors and Key Language Uses (Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue,) to design lessons that are inclusive and culturally and linguistically sustaining.

Engage elementary students with activities that can broaden their perspective about the world around them. Discover fun, interdisciplinary games and role-playing activities that explore natural resources (distribution, extraction, and communal management), changes over time of human settlements and how these settlements affect their local and global ecosystems. Stimulate discussion, critical thinking and problem-solving, while building knowledge and skills in geography, economics and civic engagement. The presented activities build skills in communication, problem solving, inquiry social interaction and cooperation, listening, and more.

Discover how to integrate social studies into K-2 literacy instruction by using engaging historical content to build foundational ELA skills. This session explores strategies for creating small group activities that align with literacy standards while introducing young learners to important topics in social studies, such as community roles, cultural traditions, and historical figures. Participants will learn how to design lessons that enhance reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing skills while fostering curiosity about the world around them. By embedding social studies content into literacy small groups, educators can address multiple standards, promote cross-curricular learning, and inspire a love of both history and reading. This session is ideal for teachers seeking creative ways to connect literacy with social studies themes in early education, particularly in areas of local and U.S. history.

Elementary students need to learn the beauty of the natural world before they become interested in saving it. Young children learn through their senses and experiences. Everyday children learn how the weather changes, how people interact with the environment, how things move, the characteristics of a place and how things are built. Teachers can help children learn the basis for geographic knowledge in everyday experiences. Participants will explore concrete suggestions and interesting activities including connections for both the classroom and to share with parents at home. Participants will experience hands-on activities together connecting everyday things to expand geographic thinking using maps, globes, books and exhibits.