This is a guest post by Lesley Boatright. If you like what you see here, check back frequently for more posts, click here to see her other posts , and click here to read her blog, Practice Makes Perfect .
Teaching social studies is always a challenge for me. In my smallish Catholic school, there is a limited textbook budget, and it seems like every time it's time to upgrade the first grade social studies books, the money runs out. The copyright date on the books I currently use is 2003!
I have no beef with the textbook itself; it's a perfectly good text, and the information for first grade probably hasn't changed so much that we need to get new books every five years like we do in reading and math. But we no longer get any supplemental materials that come along with the texts, so we're left to our own devices as to how we want to teach the objectives (probably a good thing!). So I was thrilled to find these two little books from the My World series , What's a Community and Very Important People . I knew they tied in nicely with the social studies objectives.
I started with What's a Community? . Using the posters I made to accompany the book, I started by introducing the key vocabulary from the book.
Then I read the story and we discussed all the different communities of which we are a member. We made an anchor chart of big paper as we talked about our communities.
After that, we talked about our place in the world, starting with our neighborhood. From there, we discussed that our neighborhoods were all a part of our town (city, if you live in an urban environment). We went on to say that our town (city) is a part of our state, our state is a part of our country, and our country is on the continent of North America. We completed this little foldable booklet to reinforce what we learned.
Please enjoy the downloadable freebie I've included to help you teach about communities. Be sure to frequently check back to catch my next blog post to see how I used Very Important People to learn about people in our community.
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For more information about the My World series shown in this post, click here to visit our website , or click the image on the left below to download a series information sheet with key features. To download the lesson packet, click the image to the right.
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