Unit plan
At Sycamore Elementary our curriculum is Social Studies Alive! During my graduate coursework I used this curriculum as a base to teach my second graders about Communities.
- How do communities change?
- How did one community (San Francisco) change?
- How did one person change their community?
I created a newsletter to introduce the topic to students and families as well as an interview for students to do after the first few lessons to help make the topic relevant by including their family members. Unfortunately only half the class brought these interviews back to school. Those who did bring them back returned some great gems!
Family Letter
Take-Home Interview
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Unit PresentationA main part of my teaching philosophy is including photographs into student learning to engage them and be of greater interest more than photos in a textbook or old overhead transparency.
Having a social studies unit derive from an older curriculum, I had resources that were outdated and unrelated to students. During the lessons about San Francisco I took away the curriculum transparencies showing "recent" photos of the city and instead used my own photography from past trips (both less than 5 years ago) to engage students and create those connections with such a faraway place. Not only does this portray realistic images of the urban city, but it also allows students to connect and engage with a city they've never seen, been to, or heard of - especially when they see their teacher petting a shark! Through this conglomeration of photos, students began to identify differences and similarities between San Francisco and their own community of Holt, MI. This slideshow is something I put together for the entirety of my social studies unit about communities. I was lucky enough to be able to use a Smartboard in our classrooms to allow notes regarding different ideas to be taken (and retained) during instruction. |
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Lesson 3
Holt's past and present slideshow
Later in the unit we went back to looking at the community of Holt. In order to make learning about communities more interesting for my second graders I incorporated photography from different eras within their own community of Holt, MI. I used a local resource found on Facebook - Holt, Michigan: A Slice of History and created a presentation for students to look back at historical photographs of their community and try to guess where these locations were today. This was one of the most successful lessons of my unit! Not only did I enjoy looking through the photographs and creating the presentation, but my students loved trying to guess where the old photos had been taken! Students loved this part of the lesson and were so engaged and enthusiastic! Below you may see the slideshow that I used.
Resources for planning
These photos show students working on their Earth Day project (recycling plastic water bottles into colorful fish.) The other photos show students working on one of two things:
- A page for our "If Everybody Did" classroom book based on the book by Jo Ann Stover. Students thought about how they could do something bad or good to their community but if everybody did that it would change the world. This lesson was part of my community unit and was also used as a lesson study at Michigan State University. To see the lesson click on the button below.
- A poster showing how they think their community of Holt will change in 10 years.
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