Teaching Communities to Third Graders

I love teaching social studies!

There’s such a beauty in being able to share not only our past but current structures and issues.

In this unit, I’ll be teaching my students about communities. Of course, when you’re looking at communities, you teach urban, rural, and suburban. I wanted to take my unit a bit further.

I’m integrating reading standards as well!

For this unit, I’m focusing on both main idea and compare and contrast. I wrote two different texts to support student learning and even created picture-based vocabulary cards to help my students ‘see’ what they are learning.

To add a bit of whimsy to the unit, I packaged it all into a repurposed paper bag from the grocery store! Students can hold their materials in that, or in a manila folder! Last year, I did this style of unit while teaching immigration and my kids really enjoyed the process.

This unit features six days of integrated lesson plans. The plans are structured in a very straightforward way. I suggest starting with the scale and rubric. Then going into your review. Next, do a whole group lesson where you model the lesson expectations. You’ll have a time where your students collaborate together on a question or task. Then you wrap up with an independent activity.

The students will be reading about communities and tieing in that knowledge to learning about tall tales. Since they are learning about Paul Bunyan, I chose to talk about settlement patterns of immigrants in Minnesota. That lead me to also talk a little bit about the Chippewa or Ojibwe population of the northern Midwest.

One of the unique things about this particular project is that you can opt to keep all of your materials in a satchel or a bag. Hence, the name ‘History in A Bag’. You’ll need a class set of grocery store shopping bags. You’ll just cut the bag down the center and around almost to the back. You want the bottom of the bag for a drawer or pocket to hold things in. Students will glue things from the lessons into the bag.