Literature as the Guide to History

The author presents a content integration that focuses on social studies and science knowledge and skills. The idea of using folk crafts to help elementary students learn social studies extends from John Dewey's laboratory school to the twenty-first century. Meaningful content is applied to skills, such as blacksmithing, found in the community, and students make connections between school knowledge and their lives outside of school. In this activity, blacksmithing helped students integrate ideas from multiple academic subjects, incorporating content from the social sciences and humanities. The guest content expert with a specialized knowledge base played a large role in making this experience occur for the students and teachers.