This document discusses teaching concepts, facts, and generalizations in social studies. It defines each term and provides examples. Facts are specific pieces of information, concepts are abstract ideas, and generalizations are relationships between two or more concepts. The document encourages using classroom experiences like activities and projects to help students build knowledge in these three areas to better understand social studies content.

1. Facts, Concepts and
Generalizations
, 2012

2. Learning Objectives for today’s Lesson:
Students (You!  ) will be able to:
• Differentiate between a fact, concept and
generalization.
• Explain the importance of generalizations.
• Identify strategies for teaching concepts and
generalizations.
This relates to our Course Objective of:
• Explain and implement the role of inquiry,
concepts and generalizations in Social Studies.

3. Important Idea to remember…
• Students gain factual knowledge, build
concepts and form generalizations all the
time (at home, on the playground, in front
of the tv)
• In class, we want to create experiences for
students to gain factual knowledge, build
concepts and form generalizations that
help them understand Social Studies
content (life!) better.

4. Facts
• Do not need to be
“academic” sounding.
• Do not need to be
detailed.
• Examples of Facts:
– My family has four
people in it.
– Florida has a warmer
winter than Canada.

5. Concepts
• Ideas
• Abstract
• Construct Meaning
• Examples:
– Family
– Climate
– Nation
– Island
– War

6. Activity
• Pick an age group and discuss what “factual” knowledge
you would expect your students to have based on their
prior experience.
• Your group will have one of the following concepts:
– Family
– Community
– Money
– Trade
– War
– Internet
– Religion
– Government
– Law

7. Generalization
• Relationships among 2 or more concepts.
• These can be big understandings/ideas for a
unit.
• Examples:
– Families vary in structure, number and experience.
– Climate varies by location.
– War has negative effects for the environment and
citizens of a region.
– Creating, using and understanding maps helps us
understand our world and its people.

9. Generalizations: Customers
need to make choices at stores based on
the amount of money they have and the
cost of items.
Concepts: Cost, Product, Sales,
Store, Money
Facts: Cars 2 Movie cost $15.00.
Milk cost 3.90. Baby Formula cost $24.00.
Mom has 30.00. Mom says she doesn’t
have enough money for the movie I want.

10. Activity
• Playground
• Restaurant
• Riding in Car
• Playing Baseball
• Hallway at School
• Going to the Airport
• Going to the Library
• Watching a professional hockey game.

11. Generalizations: Creating,
understanding and using maps can help us
learn about the world and its people.
Concepts: Map, Location, Scale,
Legend/Key, Data, Index, Grid, Source, Title,
Orientation/Direction
Facts: 39*North and 92*W are the
latitude and longitude coordinates of my
hometown. Grids can be used to find a place
on a map and while travellling. Geographic
Information systems store data. Maps are
more attractive to me when they are in color.
Legends tell what the symbols mean on a
map.

12. Activity
• Create a Facts, Concepts, Generalizations
triangle to include some of your ideas for
your thematic unit.
• Consider and list on the side:
– Possible Misconceptions
– Possible Inaccurate Generalization

13. Experiences in the classroom.
• Like Inquiry, creating experiences where
students gain factual knowledge, construct
concepts and form generalizations can
take many forms.
– Inquiry based activities
– Guided Discovery (what we’ll be doing today)
– Field Trips
– Books
– Summative Projects

14. Africa Posters Activity
• “Country Projects”
• “Concept Maps”
• Developed Countries
• Examples and Non Examples
• Gather Data

15. • Concept Map

16. Matching Quiz
• Based on readings and lecture.