Teaching Social Studies using Poetry, Art and Music

1 Teaching Social Studies using Poetry, Art and Music There are many evident benefits of incorporating poetry, art and music in the teaching of social studies. Besides the beautiful and artistic novelty that poetry, art and music brings in the classroom, these aspects can be used to teach social studies which can lead to better acquisition of even concepts that would appear complicated to young learners. In addition, the learners are empowered with the skills of creating and reviewing various forms of human expressions which makes them able to remember the concepts they learnt even after a long time. It has also been proved that poetry assists students to achieve better in other high stake tests due to its ability to provide their minds with an exhilarating workout.

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Incorporation of these aspects in teaching is beneficial to both the teacher and the learners. This is due to the value that they add to the social studies class. Firstly, poetry, art and music skills provide integrative activities that facilitate effective description of events in any time period. This is through the ability it gives the teacher to express different positions on a certain topic. As a result, students are able to speculate emerging possibilities on issues and even the metacognitive implications that these situations may exhibit. This is because as they learn through writing poetry and expressing their ideas through art and music, these learners are engaged in a higher cognitive level than just responding to questions from the teacher. They are able to think and reflect through acting on their thoughts. These activities enable them to examine their thoughts making it easy for learning to occur.

Using poetry, art and music has also been identified as an opportunity for learners to demonstrate their talent and even excel in areas that they have a high aptitude in. This is through the opportunity that these activities provide to the learners where they get a chance to demonstrate their different side that may be hard to identify in class.

Poetry for instance, is a discipline that is known to flavor the activities that individuals engage in everyday. Incorporating it in the classroom therefore would be highly effective for the good learning of the students. In social studies for instance, the contents taught can be projected through poetry to enhance its natural beauty. This can be done at any grade level since children are exposed to poetry right from nursery class all the way up. The only important function when selecting the appropriate poem for a specific grade is to draw the instructional planning. This is where one considers the level at which learners begin writing poems while very young learners can be guided on how to create oral poems which the teacher can inscribe for them. These

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children can also be taught on how to relate their oral poems with drawings on the subject of their study.

There are important points to consider when adopting poetry in the teaching of social studies. Firstly, the teacher should consider his or her students’ reading level. This is because the ability to process words into thoughts is an activity that requires the student to possess a high level of mental maturity and even enough experience with written materials. This may be influenced by factors like age, socio-economic, academic disabilities and environmental factors.

It is also important for the teacher to consider the students’ vocabulary level and their sentence length. The teacher therefore chooses poems with shorter sentence length and those that are simple to younger students who lack very high experience in writing skills. The other important aspect that the teacher puts into consideration is the students’ comprehension level. This means that for inexperienced young learners, the teacher avoids the more complicated aspects in poetry but concentrates on basic aspects like the use of figurative language and other simple aspects with the main focus of maintaining the interest of the students in order to keep the lesson learning effectively.

Some of the activities that can be considered when using poetry in teaching social studies include writing a poem on the study of the topic of discussion. For instance, the teacher can decide to involve the students on writing a descriptive poem on physical features like the mountains. The poem can use various aspects used in poetry like personifying the features. In order to make the students understand every bit of the poem before analyzing it, he or she can help them to put the poem into a song after which they can memorize and sing it. The learners can also act out the words in the poem as they read it aloud. This activity can be followed by discussion of the new vocabulary learnt in the poem and then response to the questions the

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teacher generates from the poem regarding the concepts he or she requires the students to acquire.

Art is the other discipline that can be incorporated in teaching social studies. Its ability generate enjoyment in learning together with enabling students to express various aspects of society and even the environment graphically makes acquisition of concepts more effective (Kirman, 2008). Some of the activities that the teacher can incorporate in order to add interest in the instruction of social studies include; drawings, maps, computer use, displays, crafts and art analysis. All this should be developed beginning from what the students understand and progress to more complicated aspects to be taught in the topic.

Music can be used to teach various aspects of social studies due to its numerous benefits.

The obvious benefit is that the concepts taught to young children through music cannot be easily forgotten since children love music. This is clearly evident in their enthusiasm to sing, listen and even dance to the rhythms of various songs. This has made most teachers adopt a practice of starting their lessons with songs and musical movements even when the teacher is not teaching a music lesson. Research has also shown that music promotes mental growth thus it should be an important ingredients in the children’s instruction. For children with disabilities like those who are autistic, music has a lot of intellectual and physical benefits.

While teaching social studies using music, the teacher needs to choose the topic to discuss with the learners after which the content learnt by the learners can be summarized into a rhythmic song. In order to make it easy and memorable, the teacher can incorporate multicultural events (Fielding, 2005). This can be done jointly with the assistance of a subject specialist and a talented musician in the class. One principle though is that the music should remain simple both in expression and the accompaniments. Some of the activities that can be

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achieved through incorporation of music in social studies include description of a place or culture of a certain people among others.

There are several issues that the article highlights that need reconsideration. Firstly, incorporating poetry, art and music need very careful consideration and experience on the side of the teachers. This is because stressing so much on poetry technicalities like structure and analysis may lead to loss of fun and enjoyment. The most appropriate is adopting a free verse which is simple and rhythmic; this does not prevent the flow of creativity but instead empowers students to express themselves without limitation.

The decision to work with subject specialists in incorporating these disciplines in the teaching of social studies can be challenging to schools that have no enough resources. This is particularly in institutions that have not learnt to utilize the materials that may be available in the environment. Art, for instance, may require more supplies due to activities like drawing which may require use of pencils, crayons and oil painting among others. Seeking the assistance of the talented musicians in the classroom may have a negative impact on the other learners. This is because the student involved may concentrate his talent to gain popularity thus interfering with acquisition of the right concepts (Morris & Obenchain, n.d).

In conclusion, teachers can incorporate poetry, art and music to foster the students’ observation power and their knowledge of the scientific world. This is easily achieved through provision of experiences that assist to develop the exploration skills among the learners and also equipping learners with the ability become better readers.

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Fielding J. (2005). New approaches to teaching history: Engaging students in learning history.

Canadian Social Studies, 39(2) Kirman, J. M. (2008). Elementary social studies: Creative classroom ideas, 4/E. Canada: Pearson Education Canada.

Morris, R. V. & Obenchain, K. M. (n.d). Three methods for teaching the social studies to students through the arts. Retrieved 18 January 2012 from http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/css/css_35_4/arsocstud_through_arts.htm