Putting Things Into Focus: Using a Focus Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to Cultivate Cross-Disciplinary Connections in the Elementary Classroom

“I don’t have time to teach Social Studies!” In today’s classrooms, this lament is all too familiar. As teachers, finding time to address all required and necessary content in a single school day can be challenging. With a greater testing emphasis on language arts and math, ancillary subjects like science and social studies are often squeezed into the final minutes of the day, put into alternative rotation, or disregarded (Fitchett, et al., 2014; McGuire, 2007). The Inquiry Design Model (IDM), provides a cross-disciplinary solution for infusing social studies concepts into language arts instruction so that history can become an asset rather than an afterthought. In this article, we introduce the IDM and provide two concrete examples of how this model can be used in lower (K-2) and upper (3-5) elementary school settings. These examples provide a case for how teachers can implement this engaging instructional tool in their own classrooms to integrate social studies into language arts instruction.