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1. What Is a Community?
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| Students learn that a community is a place where people live, work, play, and solve problems together. In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, students design a community that includes places to live, work, and play. |
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2. How Are Communities Different?
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| Students learn about three types of communities. In a Visual Discovery activity, they learn about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of urban, rural, and suburban communities. |
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3. How Do We Use Maps?
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| Students learn about maps and map tools. In a Social Studies Skill Builder, they read and answer questions about maps. |
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4. What Is Geography?
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| Students learn that communities have different geographic features and that physical maps show these features. In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students practice identifying geographic features and locating them on a physical map. |
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5. How Do People Use Our Environment?
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| Students explore how people use (and misuse) our environment. In a Response Group activity, they explore how people use natural resources in various environments and discover the effects of pollution. |
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6. How Are Goods Made and Brought to Us?
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| Students learn how goods are produced and distributed. In an Experiential Exercise, students make a toy using assembly-line techniques, participate in a relay race to learn how goods are transported to stores, and read about how goods are produced and distributed. |
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7. Who Provides Services in a Community?
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| Students learn about people who provide services in a community. In Writing for Understanding, students create puppets representing service workers and write descriptions of their workers' jobs. Then students describe their puppets' jobs at a "job fair." |
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8. How Can I Be a Good Shopper?
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| Students learn what it means to be a good shopper. In an Experiential Exercise, students make choices about what to buy and distinguish between economic needs and wants. They also read about economic principles and practices that help consumers spend wisely. |
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9. How Do Communities Change?
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| Students learn how communities change. In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, students read about how communities grow and change and create a plan to make a neighborhood better. |
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10. How Did One Community Change?
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| Students learn how San Francisco grew from a small town into a large city. In a Visual Discovery activity, they analyze images of San Francisco in 1846 and 1849 and then create act-it-outs to explore what life was like during those two time periods. Students also build a timeline by placing the events of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in sequence. |
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11. How Can One Person Make a Difference in a Community?
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| Students learn how people from the past made a difference in their communities. In a Response Group activity, students propose possible solutions to given community problems and compare their solutions with how people actually solved these problems. |
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12. How Do Leaders Help Their Communities?
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| Students learn about community leaders. In an Experiential Exercise, they make predictions about what leaders can do. Then they conduct a mock demonstration urging community leaders to take certain actions to fix a playground. |
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13. What Does a Good Citizen Do?
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| Students learn how to be good citizens in their community. In a Writing for Understanding activity, students create a Good Citizen book to record the good-citizen actions they will perform. |
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14. What Do Communities Share?
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| Students learn how communities in the United States are connected. In an Experiential Exercise, students discover the economic interdependence of communities and states by exchanging product cards. They also complete a map illustrating social connections among communities. |
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