What social study topics are taught in elementary school?
Like science, elementary schools don’t tend to do a ton of social studies. I think we used to do more than we do now, the little kids focus on things like map reading and real basic geography types of stuff, typically in fourth or fifth grade they’ll do something on states, particularly their own state and then in fifth or sixth grade they’ll do U.S. history, which is kind of a basic version that’ll lead up to the U.S. history they’ll take again in middle school and high school. Some basic citizenship stuff, some basic government stuff, and it depends, depending a lot on the teacher and how much they work in. A lot of the literature books also have a good amount of history, they’ve got stories that are set in historical periods, and that’s the way a lot of teachers bring history into the classroom even though it’s not a huge priority right now.
