The Importance Of Social Studies For Young Children

The field of social studies is huge, and children are so young but children are born into social studies because at each stage of early development—infant, toddler, preschool, and primary—children are always exploring to make sense their social and physical environments. Social studies for young ones begins with the child and when they gradually expands their awareness of the world around them such as family, neighborhood, and community. The two main purposes of the social studies for early childhood is to prepare children to assume the office of citizen and to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes in different subjects. Social studies will come naturally when the child is in a DAP environment where the rights of each individual are constantly …show more content…
Nowadays, social studies has to be integrated, meaningful and high of interest for children. According to two theorists, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky and Maria Montessori both demonstrated that play can be used as a learning strategy in the development of a social studies curriculum. Vygotsky indicates that learning is the result of firsthand experiences that comes from the child 's environment. He believed that play and exploration was a major educative activity where social interactions will occur during these activities. Vygotsky had influenced educators that we can see the social and emotional development of young children through play because as children play teachers will observe and notice that children will learn to interact with one another through play where they ask for items to play with, or asking to play with each other. Maria Montessori influenced educators when it comes to social and emotional development because Montessori 's curriculum encourages a learning environment where teachers have to observe the child carefully and establish what the children need to optimize their academic and social development. This influences us to learn more about the social and emotional growth for young children because we will prepare a learning environment that will capture the children 's interest which is play and engage them into an activity that is meaningful for them. A demonstration that show play can be used as a learning strategy in the development of a social studies curriculum would be using blocks to build streets they see when they take a walk around school. The students will connect to the world by playing and building what they saw on their walk. This is meaningful to them because they encounter this same street when they come to school. Children will be