Social studies prepares students to be well-rounded citizens. Social studies informs, inspires and encourages deeper thinking, and engages students with the real world. There are four disciplines in social studies, history, government/civics, economics, and geography. Social studies is also commonly referred to as social sciences. Teaching social studies to elementary students can be difficult because there is a lot of tough subject matters. Often times social studies is only taught when it is close to a holiday, but I am hoping to be the change when it comes to my instruction. Students need to be well informed about the disciplines that are included and that cannot be done when only teaching about holidays. 

I believe that it is crucial to teach social studies in elementary school. Students need to know about themselves and those around them. So much of our daily life is enriched with social studies topics so students need to learn about and be exposed to that at a young age. In my classroom I hope to regulary teach social studies and make it an important topic in my classroom. I want to use social studies to teach other subjects such as reading. Students need to practice reading to develop those skills, so why not use social studies materials to do that? Social studies improves reading skills so it just makes sense for me to teach it in my future classroom.