In a Problem Solving Group activity, students design a community that includes places to live, work, and play.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Visual Discovery activity, students learn about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of urban, rural, and suburban communities.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students work in pairs to read and answer questions about maps.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, pairs identify geographic features and locate them on a physical map.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Response Group activity, students explore how people use natural resources in various environments and discover the effects of pollution.

Why Teach This Lesson?

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.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Writing for Understanding activity, students create puppets representing service workers and write descriptions of their workers' job that they then present at a "job fair."

Why Teach This Lesson?

In an Experiential Exercise, students make choices about what to buy and distinguish between economic needs and wants. Then they read about economic principles and practices that help consumers spend wisely.

In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, students read about how communities grow and change. They then create a plan to make a neighborhood better.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Visual Discovery activity, students 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. Then they build a timeline by placing the events of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in sequence.

In a Response Group activity, students propose possible solutions to given community problems and compare their solutions with how people actually solved these problems.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In an Experiential Exercise, students make predictions about what leaders can do. Then they conduct a mock demonstration urging community leaders to take certain actions to fix a playground.

Why Teach This Lesson?

In a Writing for Understanding activity, students create a Good Citizen book to record the good-citizen actions they will perform.

Why Teach This Lesson?

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.