Good Citizenship for Second Grade Social Studies

2 hours ago

2 min read

0

I am back to teaching second grade! I love teaching second grade. This is a huge year for building the foundational skills students will use for the rest of their lives. However, I have always struggled to make some of the social studies content meaningful for the kids.

Our first social studies topic is good citizenship. This is a great way to start the year as students are learning to be good citizens in our classroom community. As simple as this topic may seem to adults, I have seen students struggle to understand it. They latch on to the first example we saw and don't move beyond that. According to my second graders, being a good citizen means picking up trash and helping old people cross the street.

I decided they needed more examples to broaden their understanding of citizenship. Kids actually learn best when they go from specifics to more general ideas. For example, they need to see a bunch of things that are green: grass, plants, a toy, a cup, a blanket etc... before they can understand the concept of the color green. Good citizenship is just like that.

To give my students lots of examples of good citizenship, I created short nonfiction texts. The first six are examples of hypothetical people in a community, such as a firefighter and a librarian. The last twelve are about famous athletes.

In my classroom, I am going to give each table group (we have three people at a table) a page on one of the hypothetical people. They will talk about how that person is a good citizen and connect it to their own lives. For example, they have all seen a nurse at a doctor's office. I will have groups rotate to several tables to learn about different people.

We don't have much time for social studies, so we won't have time to work with the athlete examples, but I will introduce them and have them available as a reading station.

If you are interested in using these citizenship texts in your classroom, I am happy to share them! You can see them below and click this link to get them on Canva.

I hope these are a helpful resource in your classroom!

I also have lots of phonics and writing resources! You can check them out using the links below!