Transcript

This is a combined social studies and literacy unit. It's very important to me to program in an integrated way so that students are reading for a purpose, writing for a purpose and so that there's always a topic that we're exploring; and I think that's the best kind of learning for kids. So what we have first are the expectations that we laid out together with the students, we looked at what we were going to be exploring in this unit. And we always start with kind of a big idea that we're looking to get to by the end of the unit, and that was looking at how communities around the world compare to our local community. And we started with examining the local community and then branched out to different communities around the world. 

And the big idea that we were trying to get at was that although communities, internationally and locally, are organized in different ways they're all organized for the same basic purpose. And that's to meet the needs and the wants of the people who live in them. So we started out, I mean I started out as a teacher with that idea, and shared that with my students, and then through that process of looking at that big idea as the overarching theme of the whole unit we investigated different specific things about the communities both locally and around the world. So that first part is what I want students to understand, and then I have them do a number of things that are specific sub-tasks or specific activities, research, writing, viewing, but all of those things relate to the big idea that we're going after. We're trying to build that understanding by doing specific things. So what students did that's also listed on the expectations, or referred to, was to look at a local community in which they live, most of them live in this neighbourhood but some of them live out of district, so they looked at their own local community, and then compared that to an international community of their choice. 

And once we had, sort of, looked at the different options, choice is kind of one of those things, it means something different to me than it does to a first or second grader, they had a choice from a range of international communities that I had resources for and that I was able to provide them with. And they researched those communities looking at specific features of those communities, the things that have tied the international communities together with our local community. So, looking at education, looking at health and safety, looking at food and clothing and figuring out that in each community around the world those particular features are organized differently but they all have the same purpose, whether you're living in a community in a country in Africa or in a community in Russia you have the same basic needs, and your community is organized to help to meet those needs. So by planning that unit from outset as the teacher looking at those big ideas I was getting at, planning a series of sub-tasks that all relate to that big idea, sharing that with the students and putting down those expectations together so that everybody understands the context. We really focused on that big idea for about a month and it was the driver for what students were reading, what they were writing, what they were doing in the library, what they were doing during literacy centers. It was the thing that we were learning, and I think that students learn best that way, when they can just say I'm learning about communities around the world and it's more or less my job to know how that breaks down into curriculum.