Students with special learning problems, like all children, need to learn social studies. The challenge, however, is how to provide access to social studies content in a general education setting to children with mild disabilities. For at least 20 years the traditional textbook-based instructional approach has been found to be ineffective. The traditional method of lecture-read-group discussion is likely to miss the needs of many students with learning problems, especially those at the middle and secondary levels, where textbooks are heavily used. Overwhelming numbers of students with learning problems are reading two or more years below grade level--never mind that they lack strategies for comprehension skills such as drawing inferences or locating main ideas to apply to real-world situations. This article discusses effective instructional strategies for teaching social studies to children with mild learning problems, including models of social studies instruction, instructional formats, and implementation of such strategies.