Social studies is about preparing our children to be active participants in the social, economic and political worlds of adults in the future. It is also about making children aware that they can influence the choices that people around them make and that their current decisions have consequences too. Their responsiveness to issues that are important to them can make their worlds better now and in the future. With the addition of enforced test preparation and oversight, students now have fewer opportunities to spend "quality time" with their teacher, exploring connections between ideas and building networks of knowledge about their world. Teachers are feeling pressured to narrow or even eliminate social studies in their classroom. In this article, the author focuses on lesson planning because it allows teachers to make the best use of their time with students, especially under today's pressures of "high-stakes" testing. (Contains 8 endnotes.)