Fort Dodge Community School District

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Second Grade Social Studies Overview

The Social Studies Curriculum in Second Grade acquaints students with their community.  Resources for the Social Studies Curriculum are varied, but the basic curriculum is the Social Studies Alive Curriculum developed by Teachers Curriculum Institute.

Social Studies Alive:  The second grade level of Social Studies Alive!  offers a full-year program with 14 lessons that help children explore social studies concepts through teacher-led activities as they continue to develop their reading skills.  A colorful, considerate text contains companion readings for each learning activity.

  • Chapter 1: What is a Community? Students design a community that includes places to live, work and play.

  • Chapter 2: How Are Communities Different? Students learn how to use a map to locate important places in a community.

  • Chapter 3: Maps.  Students learn how to use a map to locate important places in a community

  • Chapter 4: Geography.  Students play a game, sing a song, and read to learn about mountains, valleys, deserts, plains, rivers, lakes, islands and oceans.

  • Chapter 5: How do People Use the Environment.  Students explore how people use natural resources and sometimes misuse their environment.

  • Chapter 6: How Are Goods Made and Brought to Us? Students work on an "assembly line" and participate in a "transportation" relay race to learn about the production and distribution of goods.

  • Chapter 7: Who Provides Services in a Community?  Students learn about the service occupations through puppets and pantomime.

  • Chapter 8: How Can I be A Good Shopper? Students learn to distinguish between needs and wants as they discover how to be wise shoppers.

  • Chapter 9: How Do Communities Change? Students discover why communities grow and decline, and make a plan to improve a neighborhood.

  • Chapter 10: How Did One Community Change? Students learn how, over 50 years, San Francisco changed from a small seaport into a large urban area.

  • Chapter 11: How Can One Person Make a Difference in a Community?  Students learn about four individuals from the past who made significant contributions to their communities.

  • Chapter 12: How Do Leaders Help Their Communities?  Mock elections, city council meetings and demonstrations are held as students learn how leaders serve their communities.

  • Chapter 13: What Does a Good Citizen Do? Students learn ways that they can be good citizens in their communities.

  • Chapter 14: What Do Communities Share?  Students discover the social and economic  connections among communities across the United States.

Through the study of the lessons above, as well as units integrated with reading, students in second grade will continue their study of the following Iowa Core Social Studies Standards:

  • Understand the changing nature of society.
  • Understand interactions between self and the peer group.
  • Understand the relationship of the individual to the components of society and culture.
  • Understand the role of scarcity and economic trade-offs and how economic conditions impact people's lives.
  • Understand that the basic nature of economics is an exchange of resources.
  • Understand how governments throughout the world influence economic behavior.
  • Understand people in all parts of the world trade with one another.
  • Understand that changes in technology impact individuals and society.
  • Understand the universal economic concepts of needs and wants.
  • Understand the use of geographic tools to locate and analyze information about people, places, and environments.
  • Understand how human factors and the distribution of resources affect the development of communities and the movement of populations.
  • Understand how geographic processes and human actions modity the environment and how the environment affects humans.
  • Understand people construct knowledge of the past from multiple and various types of sources.
  • Understand how and why people create and participate in governance.
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