Welcome to
Arkansas Stories, Arkansas Studies
The Arkansas Studies Curriculum
Early Childhood – Fifth Grade
The Arkansas Studies Curriculum is a continuous, vertically-integrated whole, with each year of instruction building on what has gone before and anticipating what is to come. It provides materials designed specifically to meet the legal requirements for instruction in Arkansas History at each elementary grade as well as for more rigorous instruction at the secondary level. The segments of the curriculum designed for Early Childhood through the Fifth Grade are now ready for adoption.
The curriculum in Early Childhood through the 4th Grade introduces themes and emphases as building blocks that prepare young students to engage integrated units of Arkansas history in the 5th Grade. Content for Early Childhood through the 2nd Grade emphasizes Arkansas’ physical geography and environment as a context in which families and institutions develop. With the 3rd and 4th grades the context shifts more toward social and economic interaction and how these elements have changed over time. In the 5th Grade the context shifts again, this time towards a chronological narrative that begins to integrate Arkansas’ social, political, and economic themes with its important environmental characteristics as well as with national and international ideas and events.
While each grade level features its own primary instructional media and content, extensive sets of images, sidebars, overviews, songs, primary materials, and links to other in-state and on-line sources of information will appear at each level. These supplemental materials enable teachers to expand the opportunities for investigation and discovery to meet the needs of particular classrooms or individual students. In addition, each of these resource sets will be accompanied by example Lesson and Unit Plans providing guidance and ideas about how these resources can be integrated and used within the classroom. All examples are tied explicitly to Arkansas Department of Education Frameworks.
Formal work on the Arkansas Studies Curriculum began during the summer of 2003 and has been sustained by a partnership between the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the Central Arkansas Library System, and Archeological Assessments, Inc. Critical assistance has been provided to the project from The Bridge Fund, an endowment administered by the Arkansas Community Foundation and dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of Arkansas History.
To learn more about the curriculum please click on the images to the left, or contact us at [email protected]
Charley Sandage’s Arkansas Stories Vols. I, II, and for Young Children can now be purchased on-line at our Amazon.com shop.