The Power of Historical Knowledge | Louisiana Teachers

Oct 7, 2025

Angela Barfoot, a second-grade teacher, and Lauren Cascio, a fifth-grade teacher, share their transformative experiences using the Bayou Bridges curriculum in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. They highlight how content-rich social studies instruction captivates students, making history exciting and relevant. Engaging visuals and virtual field trips, like their visit to the Poverty Point site, bring lessons to life. Additionally, linking social studies to ELA instruction fosters a love for historical texts, sparking enthusiasm and critical thinking among young learners.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Curriculum Transformed Teacher Confidence

Bayou Bridges transformed social studies from dull worksheets to lively, varied lessons with strong visuals and teacher supports.
Teachers feel more confident because the materials reteach content and prepare them deeply before instruction.

ADVICE

Use Storytelling And Visualization

Use storytelling techniques and vivid visuals to help students visualize historical scenes and remember content.
Prompt students to visualize and imagine themselves in historical situations to strengthen retention.

INSIGHT

Cross-Subject Knowledge Reinforcement

ELA and social studies curricula now overlap intentionally, reinforcing background knowledge across subjects.
Students apply knowledge from Guidebooks or CKLA to social studies units, making learning cumulative and transferable.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

The more history young students know, the more they want to know. That’s one of the joyful discoveries that elementary teachers are making in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. In this episode, guests Angela Barfoot and Lauren Cascio describe the rewards of using Bayou Bridges, a content-rich, knowledge-building social studies curriculum, in combination with a high-quality ELA curriculum, Louisiana Guidebooks.

Extensive teacher notes, rich texts, engaging visuals, and tie-ins to virtual field trips make for exciting history study in the elementary grades, the teachers tell host Barbara Davidson. For example, after studying Native American communities in class, students visited the nearby Poverty Point World Heritage Site and were cheering with excitement on the bus, Barfoot says.

“We’re not even there yet, and the kids start screaming, ‘The bird mound! Mound A!’ And they’re just—they can see it and they are just thrilled out of their minds. . . they were just beyond thrilled that they knew all this!”

Students are also choosing to read about historical topics at the school library, Cascio reports. They are reaching for historical fiction and non-fiction texts about what they’ve learned in social studies.

“Fifth graders love a fact,” she says. “It excites me because I want them to read different genres, and because that’s part of what I need them to do.”

Learning about different people, places, and times is enriching in multiple ways. Between knowledge-building instruction and engaging texts in their social studies and ELA curricula, students are being shown “a world that they’ve never seen before,” Cascio says.

“It is teaching them to think,” Barfoot says. “And to not take things at face value, but to really dive deep.”

Ouachita Parish was recently featured by the Knowledge Matters School Tour; visit our website for more information, including videos of lessons and interviews with students and teachers.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.