THE FIVE POWERFUL ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL STUDIES

The five powerful elements of social studies are: meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. Meaningful means engaging and connecting students with real world situations. Integrative refers to draws on more than one discipline, subject, or skill set. Value – based strengthen the students sense of democratic values and social responsibility. Challenging means incorporating different perspectives and draws on students’ critical thinking skills. Active refers to the use of manipulative or physical environment. It is important as a teacher to incorporate the five powerful elements of social studies into your lessons. Incorporating the five powerful elements into your lesson while teaching will be beneficial to the students as well because it will be a fun, engaging lesson for the students to enjoy. I learned how to implement these elements into my classroom. 

ECONOMICS

"Economics as a body of knowledge includes the concepts, generalizations, and theories developed by people to try to extend their scarce natural, human, and captial resources so that they can fulfill their basic needs and as many of their wants as possible. An important key to the accomplishment of this goal is a systematic way of thinking and making economic decisions" (Sunal, 2011). There are many trends and concepts of teaching economics such as: the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, the study of economics and of economic decision making, why scarcity and descision making are considered the key to economic understanding, how to teach the economic decision making model to the students, how economics influences the lives of all people, communities, and nations, and how interdependence impacts all nations bringing them benefits from economic cooperation. 

I got to research the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics. The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics are microeconomics focuses on how decisions are made by individuals and the consequences of those decisions, meanwhile macroeconomics examines the aggregate behavior of the whole economy. 

I would implement this in my classroom, by introducing them to the students. I will then give the students examples and as a class we would identify whether its mircoeconomics or macroeconomics explaining why. This will involve the class to communicate with one another and work together as a team. 
PowerPoint Presentation

Video: Microeconomics Vs. Macroeconomics