Social Studies Unit on Communities

(written to coincide with beginning of the year, beginning to work with laptops)

**Make sure the students have their home addresses in their agendas and/or memorized before they begin the google earth activities.**

Chapter 1

1. Work through book lessons (Chap 1: The Places We Live) What is a Community (vocab: community, law, citizen), the skillbuilder activity/review of map skills (map title, map key, compass rose) and Kinds of Communities (vocab population, urban area, suburb, rural area).
2. Then explore Google Earth.
3. Direct them to check out the compass rose in the upper right hand corner.  (Make the connection that we covered that in lesson 2 in the book)
4. Allow/direct the students to look for landmarks in St. Petersburg (The Pier 800 2nd Ave NE St. Petersburg Florida, Tropicana Field St. Petersburg Florida, Sunshine Skyway Bridge St. Petersburg Florida, Perkins Elementary 2205 18th Ave S, St. Petersburg Florida).
5. Search for their own home addresses.
6. Search for an urban (ex: New York City, NY), suburban (ex: College Park Atlanta, GA) and rural area (ex: Franklin, NC--use the tilt function on google earth to see the landforms, etc).
7. Using WORD, ask them to write/type a quick reflection on what they saw and how it helped them connect to the vocabulary.  (Alternative, you may allow them to explain the vocabulary based on what they saw.)
8. In word, be sure to cover making capital letters, indenting/tabbing, using the return key, bold letters for vocabulary words, cover color/font/font size. Also, we can do some color working with highlighting nouns, verbs, etc.  Also, be sure to teach selecting text, underlining, double underlining (under format, click font, then underline style).

Chapter 2

1. Teach the lessons and vocabulary for the second chapter on land and resources.
2. Again using google earth, explore different landforms, climates, a coast, and a desert.
3. Also, explore the capital of Florida and of the United States.
4. Encourage them to explore other capitals.
5. Again, ask them to write a reflection on what they saw and what might happen to the natural resources of that area (tie in pollution that could effect those landforms, etc).
6. Using elementary.nettrekker.com download images: desert, a river, pollution, a plain, a plateau, erosion.  (To download, ctrl and click to download, then click save image as to save the image to the desktop).  Once the images are saved, teach then how to paste pictures into a word document.
7. In word, be sure to cover making capital letters, indenting/tabbing, using the return key, bold letters for vocabulary words, cover color/font/font size. Also, we can do some color working with highlighting nouns, verbs, etc.  Also, be sure to teach selecting text, underlining, double underlining (under format, click font, then underline style).