Exploring Culture in Second Grade
Originally posted on http://teachthelove.blogspot.com/2018/04/exploring-culture-in-second-grade.html
What is culture?
According to my second graders, culture is the way we live. There are different parts of culture. but before we can compare our culture to someone else's, we need to figure out what OUR culture is.
As part of a unit in our social studies curriculum this year, we looked at culture. Here are some of the questions we answered throughout the unit:
Compelling Question: How Does Our Culture Make Us Similar and Different?
Supporting Question 1: what is culture?
Our first step was to define culture. We broke it up into parts, noting that culture was an umbrella term for social organization, customs and traditions, language, arts and literature, religion, forms of government, and economic systems. Of course, we did not focus on all of these, but instead chose a few to look at in each culture we explored.
Once we had a general idea of what culture was, we looked at the cultures of people in our class. I put an organizer on the board and demonstrated how to fill it out with my own culture, then had each child fill out an organizer about themselves. (They had to do the words before they could do the pictures, which was very difficult for some kids, but we wanted to make sure we spent enough time on our writing.)
For my kiddos who needed some extra help (spelling, reading, staying focused on the task), I gave them an example of a filled out organizer.
We did have to go over again what values meant, emphasizing that they were not physical objects like basketball and my video games...
After we defined our own culture, we began to explore other cultures through books and videos. Then we went on to compare and contrast (those are big kid words!) our culture and another culture (in our case, we compare the culture of a girl in Tanzania with our culture in our school.)
It was a great experience for our kids!
To download this worksheet, click here.
For more of my culture lessons, click here.
Thanks for reading! Want to see more of our culture unit? Let me know!
Miss Dominguez
What is culture?
According to my second graders, culture is the way we live. There are different parts of culture. but before we can compare our culture to someone else's, we need to figure out what OUR culture is.
As part of a unit in our social studies curriculum this year, we looked at culture. Here are some of the questions we answered throughout the unit:
Compelling Question: How Does Our Culture Make Us Similar and Different?
Supporting Question 1: what is culture?
Our first step was to define culture. We broke it up into parts, noting that culture was an umbrella term for social organization, customs and traditions, language, arts and literature, religion, forms of government, and economic systems. Of course, we did not focus on all of these, but instead chose a few to look at in each culture we explored.
Once we had a general idea of what culture was, we looked at the cultures of people in our class. I put an organizer on the board and demonstrated how to fill it out with my own culture, then had each child fill out an organizer about themselves. (They had to do the words before they could do the pictures, which was very difficult for some kids, but we wanted to make sure we spent enough time on our writing.)
After we defined our own culture, we began to explore other cultures through books and videos. Then we went on to compare and contrast (those are big kid words!) our culture and another culture (in our case, we compare the culture of a girl in Tanzania with our culture in our school.)
It was a great experience for our kids!
To download this worksheet, click here.
For more of my culture lessons, click here.
Thanks for reading! Want to see more of our culture unit? Let me know!
Miss Dominguez
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