Curated OER
"CREATE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY"
Second graders, after spending several weeks developing skills necessary to become a "Community Development Team," create and build their vision of a community. Consideration is given for needs and wants, food, shelter, safety concerns,...
Curated OER
T-shirts Build School & Community Pride
Students explore ways to promote community pride by creating t-shirts. In this community activity, students utilize a digital camera to take photographs of their hometown and transfer them to a t-shirt. Students complete a creative...
Curated OER
Patterns and Shapes in Our Community
Students explore shapes and patterns found in their own community. They identify shapes and patterns in photographs, and listen to a book about shapes. Students then examine Paul Klee paintings for shapes and patterns, and create a...
Curated OER
Our Changing Community
Students investigate how communities grow and change. In this communities lesson, students discuss how their community has changed and construct a model of a community.
Curated OER
What is a Community?
Second graders write sentences in a graphic organizer about communities and what they include. In this community lesson, 2nd graders will also draw a picture based on their description.
Alabama Learning Exchange
Getting to Know You
First graders go on an in-school scavenger hunt to get to know the many kinds of people that make up an elementary school community. They work in small groups and use digital cameras to take pictures of the workers they find.
Curated OER
Intro to Building Bridges
Students participate in groups to complete the best bridge. In this bridge building lesson, students are assigned a role in building the bridge. Students will have to keep to their budgets. After the bridges are built, parents will be...
Curated OER
Exploring Our Legacy of Giving
Students analyze and interpret the meaning of a famous quote to their own lives. In this philanthropic responsibility lesson, students generate a list of positive traits shared by the local community. Students discuss what it means to be...
Curated OER
Dance: Cultural Dance Festival
Students participate in a folk dance presentation. In this multi-cultural lesson, students and their families work together to learn and perform folk dances at a school sponsored festival. The teacher acts as facilitator, working with...
Michael's Crafts
Classroom Community Bulletin Board Lesson Plan
Building a strong classroom community is a huge part of our job. This idea lets the kids help define the rules, ideas, and behaviors that they want in their classroom. They'll work together to design a bulletin board that exemplifies the...
Missouri Department of Elementary
What Color is Your Apple?
Build your classroom community with an activity that uses apples to examine oneself and their classmates. Participants draw four large apples on blank paper then exchange them within a small group. Group members write a character trait...
Yale University
inspireED Innovator's Guide
Educators and scholars come together to build a team of go-getters striving for positive change in their school and community. Become an insipreED team with this handy guide designed to get you started. Sixty pages outline the who, what,...
Facing History and Ourselves
Laws and the National Community
When it comes to the law, is justice always served? Teach scholars about how law sometimes enables prejudice of entire groups of people with a unit on World War II that includes a warm-up activity, analysis of primary sources,...
iCivics
Counties Work
Turn learning into a game by asking pupils to play an online interactive activity! Learners choose their own characters, departments, work toward building the population of their towns, earn money, and must maintain an approval rating...
Facing History and Ourselves
Appreciate, Apology, Aha
Build a strong classroom community with a closing routine that asks each participant to share something they appreciate about their classmate(s), issue an apology if they may have hurt someone's feelings or an "aha" moment when they...
Facing History and Ourselves
Teaching Strategy: Contracting
The final lesson in the First Days of School series focuses on how to build a classroom community where all class members can feel safe, heard, and valued. The resource includes step-by-step directions for engaging pupils in developing...
Missouri Department of Elementary
Fly Your Kite
Encourage scholars to become a productive community member with a kite-themed lesson. Following a review and discussion, learners complete a Venn diagram that displays the connection between character traits needed to make a home and...
Facing History and Ourselves
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Masks, a pandemic, remote learning, and isolation; scholars reflect on the past school year and consider what positive things they would like to see continued in the current school year and what negative things they would like to...
Facing History and Ourselves
Envisioning Our Classroom Space
Wouldn't it be lovely if we all had a space where we were seen, heard, and valued? As part of creating a safe, respectful classroom community, participants envision such a space and then generate a classroom contract that will establish...
Judicial Branch of California
Defining Civic Duty and Participation
A lesson, geared toward older elementary scholars, combines art with social studies to explain the purpose of civic duty and how to encourage others in the community to participate. Academics create advertising campaigns to promote civic...
Teaching Tolerance
Puppet Show
It's a play, it's a story, it's a puppet show! A lively resource provides academics with a creative outlet to express their views on diversity and social justice. Scholars are responsible for writing, creating, and performing a puppet...
Newseum
Civil Rights: Chronicling the Movement
Scholars investigate events in the civil rights era in their community and develop a multimedia presentation of their findings. They compare local events with national events discussed on a NewseumED timeline.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum
Service Learning Projects
Service learning projects provide pupils an opportunity to put the theories they are learning about civics into practice. Scholars investigate the needs of their community and then adopt a project for them to become involved in.
Overcoming Obstacles
Introduction to Service Learning
Introduce scholars to Service Learning with a lesson that distinguishes between Service Learning and Community Service. After reading about others involved in Service Learning, class members generate a list of issues in their communities...