Pedagogy

KidCitizen episodes capitalize on the active and social nature of young children's learning. They use primary sources for rich demonstrations, interactions, and models of literacy in the course of innovative hands-on activities that make academic content meaningful, build on prior experiences, and foster visual literacy and historical inquiry.

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See

SEE: With a mentor character, children investigate images in detail using age appropriate techniques and scaffolding. They zoom in, find, collect, and match image elements.

Think

THINK: While investigating, students collect evidence from images in their journal, then use that to think about what they are seeing – what is happening, and why?

Wonder

WONDER: Students use their journal to construct posters, timelines, or other outputs to wonder about connections between what they’ve found and their own lives.

The centerpiece of each episode is a photograph from the Library of Congress that is complemented with other primary sources representative of the app’s topic of focus. Images are selected based on research into the qualities of artifacts that are developmentally appropriate for early childhood and elementary grades.

See the article on KidCitizen in the journal Social Education