Students establish connection to location of cultures and understanding for people from the past. Students gather information through classroom procedures to examine music and artifacts. The implication of working with artifacts for the social studies field includes students getting opportunities to do critical thinking when they use the experiences they bring with them from their life into the classroom and use these to interpret the lives of people from their artifacts. Student behavior focuses on interpretation through critical thinking. Critical thinking as a part of social studies supports the idea of students becoming decision makers; students can evaluate a culture or the present by the artifacts it creates and leaves behind. Preservice teachers need experience designing discovery activities in their university methods classes; in addition, they need experience in both observing and working with children in field experiences where artifacts are used in classroom teaching. Teacher educators need to provide models of artifact instruction appropriate to primary, intermediate, and secondary students; moreover, teacher educators need to develop complex questioning strategies to guide young teachers as they help students to develop their thinking in progressively more rigorous experiences. (Contains 10 notes.)