Curated OER
Reading About Children in Other Communities
Students read about children from other communities. They describe ways in which members of other communities meet one another's needs and design a Venn diagram that compares and contrasts their own way of living to another culture.
iCivics
Step Nine: Action Campaign
It's time to take action! Learners strategize their action campaigns by using the resource and past brainstorming activities from the series that help them pinpoint problems in their communities. They use included templates to get the...
Curated OER
Community Resources
Students create a list of specific government offices and community agencies in their community. They define the services each of the agencies provides. Students demonstrate how to locate information about services providers in the...
Curated OER
Government and Community Resources
Young scholars explore how to communicate using past tense and present perfect tense verbs. They discuss words related to postal activities and the procedures to follow when mailing letters and packages, registering mail, and buying...
Curated OER
Communities
Students examine the similarities and differences between rural, suburban, and urban communities. They read about type of community in their social studies textbook, analyze the differences between Tokyo and Chicago, and complete a chart...
Curated OER
Growing in Communities, Kids on the Grow
Students participate in an after school program that promotes concern for others, recognizing differences, accepting differences, leadership roles, mentoring, self-responsibility and personal safety. They explore the diversity of their...
Curated OER
A Piece of Cake: Ocean Communities
Students explain habitats. In this model based lesson students create a model to help describe a habitat that is typical of deep-water. Students will describe how organisms such as coral and sponges add to their habitat.
Compton Unified School District
How Can We Locate Places?
How can we locate places? Maps, of course! Expose second graders to the tools available in maps and discuss how these tools can help people find locations. Students also look at communities, including what makes a community and the...
Curated OER
What Makes Our Community Special?
Explore websites, complete research, and use technological tools to create a final multimedia presentation on what makes a community special. Learners of all ages work with a partner to research an interesting aspect of their community,...
Facing History and Ourselves
Taking a Stand: Models of Civic Participation
How does an individual take a stand for a principle or belief? what skills are required to do so? What are the challenges and risks in doing so? Class members study examples of individuals engaging in such activities and then identify...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Toni Morrison's Beloved: For Sixty Million and More
Complex, disturbing, and challenging, Beloved is the focus of a lesson that provides three activities to guide a close reading of Toni Morrison's novel. Readers create chapter titles based on key plot elements or themes, identify...
American Institute of Architects
Architecture: It's Elementary!—Fifth Grade
Young citizens construct an understanding of urban planning in this cross-curricular unit. Covering every aspect of city development from the political, economic, and social influences to sustainable building practices, this 10-lesson...
Virginia Repertory Theatre
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
Accompany the story, Town Mouse Country Mouse by Jan Brett with an assortment of activities designed to reinforce concepts covering story structure, comprehension, grammar, and social studies. Here, scholars identify the difference...
National WWII Museum
Communities at War: Reading Primary Sources Imaginatively
Uncle Sam wants you to support the troops. Learners use an engaging lesson plan to analyze primary and secondary sources to discover what life was really like for American citizens at home during WWII. Pupils complete worksheets, group...
National Endowment for the Humanities
American Utopia: The Architecture and History of the Suburb
Let's build a dream house! By examining promotional materials and photographs of early suburban developments, scholars consider what led to the development of this particular American dream. The resource includes case studies of three...
Curated OER
Traveling Community Journal Project
Young scholars create an online "community journal". In this communities lesson, students use a writing template to send e-mail to various people to learn more about their community. The journal is passed from person to person.
Curated OER
Life is Weird
Separate your science class into small groups and assign each a specific deep-sea organism to research. The class will learn about all of the organisms as each group presents their assigned animal. Following their presentations, you can...
Curated OER
Chemosynthesis for the Classroom
Explorers set up Windogradsky columns with local mud so that they can culture microorganisms. After three and six weeks they make observations of the mud and the organisms growing in it. In this way they observe succession and relate...
Curated OER
How Diverse is That?
After reviewing biodiversity, learners work in small groups to analyze actual species distribution data. They learn to calculate the Shannon-Weaver diversity index for different communities. Though not particularly engaging, the content...
Curated OER
Forest Communities
Students identify tree specimens. In this tree specimens lesson, students collect different parts of a tree from the areas around the school or their home. They then work in groups to create booklet that identifies tree specimens.
Curated OER
Why Live Near Water?
Students explore why communities settle in locations where land and water meet. They create three-dimensional models to demonstrate their understanding of the numerous needs water serves. They then analyze the importance of water to...
Global Oneness Project
Communities on the Threshold of Change
Viewers of the short documentary Santa Cruz Del Islote consider how changes in climate and overfishing impact the life style of the 1,200 residents of a small island off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia.
Serendip
Changing Biological Communities – Disturbance and Succession
After cutting down a forest to make a farm, how long would it take the environment to turn an abandoned farm back into a forest? Scholars study this exact scenario while they interpret many charts and graphs of the changing ecosystems as...
Community Social Studies Unit
Lesson 1 - Community Social Studies Unit
Some problems are so big it takes an entire community to solve them. So was the case in the children's book Humphrey the Lost Whale: A True Story by Wendy Tokuda and Richard Hall. This primary grade lesson uses a class read-aloud of this...