Community+Inquiry+Unit+grade+2

Type in the content of your page here.What is community?

Day 1 – Student will define what a community is to them. ( a place to live, work and play). Students will take a walking tour of Kimberly. Using their writer's notebooks they will make a list of the area businesses and interview each business asking them how they think they contribute to this community.

Upon returning to school the students will make a list of the businesses and decide if the business is a government business, a service business or an extra store that enhances the community.

Outcome - Students walked down Main street in Kimberly in three groups. Unfortunately it was Veteran's Day and most places were closed. We will go back tomorrow and do our tour again and pick up the places that were closed. The plus side to doing our little tour today was that we saw all the flags lining the street for Veteran's Day and we included that in our discussion. When we returned to school we discovered that there are many businesses in our town and that we had a lot of services. We made a list of the Government services and the community services such as a grocery store, barber shop, beauty shop, hardware store, bank, gas station, post office, library, restaurants, flower shop, vitamin store etc.

Day 2

Students revisited the businesses that were closed and learned more about the community, especially the community government at City Hall. Each student was given a business to photograph that we visited on either day. We will print the photo's and try and reconstruct the community as is and then try and decide what we think the community might also need.

Interesting observation: The students were not aware that there was so many businesses in the community. They were also not aware of how the businesses contributed to the school. They also learned what was acceptable behavior in public and safety in crossing the street.

Day 3

Using large sheets of BB paper I wrote on the top, live, work, play, shop. The directions to the students were to find magazine pictures that illustrated these heading. It was interesting to watch them look for the pictures. Many students insisted that people only live in houses. After a bit of discussion and questions they discovered other types of housing. Some unfamiliar to this area.

It was also interesting to see what they thought work was and who does it.

When we looked at play, most students identified with games, they did not think of vacations, cooking and reading as play.

Day 4

Today we wrote a sentence to identify the picture of each community building that we had a picture of. The students told what they knew that particular community building contributed to our community. We also began reading about other kinds of communities in our reading anthology. Students then put the community pictures in a book that we made out of recycled paper.

Day 5

Student in the Second grade have chosen to do a service project for Christmas this year. They are offering to collect cans and magazines from the the community for recycling. The money earned will be donated to Heifer International to buy farm animals for a family in need. They choose Heifer International because this is a farming community and it would be a way to share our life with someone else that wants to farm too. The students are also not buying each other gifts this year in class and donating the money to Heifer. Their goal is to raise at least $700.00.

Day 6

The students read a story in their reading books about Chinatown in New York. They compared that community to their own and found out how different and the same it was. They realized that we may not have a chinese community but we do have other languages spoken in the area and other celebrations done by other families. We listed the various ways we celebrate Christmas. It was interesting to see the different ways each family tradition is.

Day 7

The students are a little bummed because their recycling may look like a lot but we are not getting much money for it. So they have decided to go Christmas carolling to the businesses in town next week and hand out a letter asking for a donation to their project. The students will draft the letter and deliver it next week. Outcome: The letter was a huge success and we managed to raise over $500.00 for Heifer International.

We continued our study of community after Christmas break. January - We focused our study around government since our new president was to be inanugarated. We did a very simplified election of classroom officers and then elected representatives and a senate. It was a bit confusing at first but we did vote on some bills for our class. It was a great way to explain rules and why our (state) community needs representatives in Washington D.C. The students also pretended to be the president and wrote a speech they would present if they were president on inagueration day.

February - We began our study of dinosaurs and the communities they lived in. Besides learning the basics about dinosaurs, we learned and discovered why dinosaurs lived possibly in the places they did and how they may have interacted in their communities. Who was in charge? Did the meat eaters ever interact with the plant eaters? Why did they become extinct, was it from lack of food, conditions or did their leaders fail to lead and protect the dinosaur herds?