Standards:
2.C&G.1 Understand the purpose of governments
2.C&G.1.1 Explain government services and their value to the community (libraries, schools, parks, etc.).
2.C&G.1.2 Explain how governments establish order, provide security and create laws to manage conflict.
2.C&G.2 Understand the roles and responsibilities of citizens.
2.C&G.2.1 Exemplify characteristics of good citizenship through historical figures and everyday citizens
2.C&G.2.2 Explain why it is important for citizens to participate in their community.
2.C.1.3 Exemplify respect and appropriate social skills needed for working with diverse groups / Essential Question:
What are the roles and responsibilities of government?
What are characteristics of good citizenship?
Standards / Guiding Questions / Day / Activity - planning for one activity per day
Formal and informal assessment should occur throughout the unit. / Resources
2C&G.1.1 / What do we need to understand about our essential question? / 1 / Put Essential Questions on chart paper to refer to through out the unit.
Read aloud the essential questionsto students, sharing descriptions and definitions of key words in the questions.
- Depending on your student’s background knowledge, generate word wall words from questions. (Best practice is not to exceed 10 words on wall at a time.) Possible words include roles, responsibilities, government, citizenship. Throughout unit as words come up, add them to list such as community and citizen. Use different informal opportunities to interact with word wall during unit. For example, Guess My Word or Word Bingo.
Listen to student discussions and add a few ideas to each chart, sharing with students that we’ll be adding more to our chart from our learning in this unit. / Chart paper
Vocabulary definitions/descriptions attached.
What are classroom jobs? / 1-2 / Background building
Introduce the idea of classroom jobs. Offer students and opportunity to “Stop and Jot” writing in response to the question; Why do we have jobs? Allow students to add to their list with a partner or table group.
Have students help establish classroom jobs list (skip this step if already established). Using the application, have students apply for a specific job. / See attached job application(will need to tally results for day 4)
What is a government job? / 3 / Government jobs
Define what a government job is (helps the community, paid for by the community).
Watch the Discovery Ed video clips. Have students discuss with partner or table group what they learned after each of the clips.(
continued on next page)
Chart a list of government helpers (note: might help to differentiate from non-government community helpers with the idea of not paying for their services. You don’t pay a firefighter when they get your cat out of the tree. You do pay the veterinarian when you bring in your cat for a check-up).
Add any new understandings from discussion to Essential Question Chart - What are the roles and responsibilities of government? / Discovery Ed video clips
Public Schools and Parks (2:09m)
Government Services (1:51m)
List of government helpers (save for day 4)
4 / Refer back to the classroom jobs. Display (possible document camera, SmartBoard, power point slide) tally chart of results. Have students ‘read’ the chart and share with a partner or table group what they notice. Students might notice which jobs were more popular or weren’t applied for at all.
Continue student partner or group conversations with the question: What might happen if unpopular jobs weren’t filled?
End discussion with assigning each student a classroom job. Have them draw a picture and write 1-2 sentences about why this job is important and what might happen if no one did this job.
Relate classroom jobs to government jobs – what could some consequences be for unfilled government jobs? Some possible ideas; Long wait time for services, less times available to access service (library, DMV), dangerous (less firemen or police)
Allow students choice of job from chart. One way to do this is have students put their top three choices on a sticky note and you put the top choice on a separate paper and determine groups. Students can work individually or in small groups of 2 or 3 and present information on government job together. / Tally chart of job results from day 2
Why are government jobs valuable? / 5-6 / Students create presentation. If in small group, students can each take one of the questions to share with class.
(1) Explain the government job and responsibilities,
(2) Why is this job important to me? Community?
(3) What would happen if no one did the job?
Use the government job paper to capture ideas and present findings through choice of media (some ideas possible power point slide, Discovery Ed Board Builder, poster). / Government job paper
List of government jobs from day 2
Assessment / 7 / Mini-speeches about government jobs (use papers to guide speeches)
Model how to respond to a presentation with positive feedback and how to ask clarifying questions with first group, then move to classroom student feedback and clarifying questions. / Rubric for speech
2C&G.1.2 / Why do we have laws? How are they created? What are consequences of not having laws? How are laws enforced? / 8 / Background building
Show video clip “Rules Are All Right”
Have students turn and talk to partner or table group about video clip with the guiding question, “Why are rules important?” Capture ideas of safety rules and order/functionality rules.
Then ask, Why do we have classroom rules?
Optional video clip – “No Rules” (This is an older clip of classroom “dream” sequence, if the classroom didn’t have rules. Silly, funny clip.)
What happens when rules aren’t followed?
Relate classroom rules to government rules (laws).
- How are they alike/different? Possible use of Venn to capture ideas.
- Do rules (laws) change? (i.e., We didn’t have rules for iPads in schools five years ago but now we do.)
“No Rules” (2:29m)
Why do we have laws? How are they created? What are consequences of not having laws? How are laws enforced? / 9 / Remind students of our Essential Question, What are the roles and responsibilities of our government?” Have students think of this question as they watch the following video clips.
Begin with video, “What is Government?” Have students respond in writing to the essential question after this clip, then turn and talk to partner to add to ideas. (It would be interesting to see if students notice how the posted classroom rules in the video clip have evolved since the filming of this clip. i.e., honoring collaboration vs. work quietly)
Repeat writing and discussion after each short clip to build knowledge and understanding. Second clip, “Three Branches” and final clip “The Legislative Branch”.
Add new understandings to Essential Question chart. / “What is Government?” (2:13m)
“Three Branches” (1:03m)
“The Legislative Branch” (1:14m)
10 / Begin lesson with review of learnings of roles and responsibilities of government. Then ask, what about our roles and responsibilities of being a good citizen? (This might be a good time to add to word wall.) Have students turn and talk about possible connections from government to people (citizen). Capture a few ideas on new Essential Question Anchor chart - What are characteristics of good citizenship?(What do good citiztens do? What do they need to know?)
Let’s watch a video and pay attention to anything we can add to our chart about good citizenship. / “A Good Citizen” (4:21m)
11 / Let’s look at historical figures and everyday heroes. Collect information on a chart showing how the person demonstrated good citizenship, contributed to his/her community and what character traits he or she demonstrated.
OR
Teacher Choice (Create): Have students explore with Discovery Education Assignment Builder different historical characters and everyday heroes. See links attached for possible sites. / Sample organizer for collecting information attached. Or use your own collection tool.
12 / Citizenship
Review the chart you have created. Ask students to draw conclusions based on what they’ve learned about what makes a good citizen and why it is important to participate in your community.
Using 4-2-1strategy,students will summarize key ideas from exploration of key individuals. Have students write 4 characteristics that they noticed from their chart. Then meet with another student to compare ideas and narrow down to 2 ideas from their list that they think are most important. Finally, meet with another group of two people to select 1 big idea from their learnings.
Groups share out. Capture big ideas from classroom work on Essential Question Anchor Chart for What are characteristics of good citizenship? / Completed organizational Chart of Citizens
13 / Students will use their personal narratives as a focal point to create a scrapbook page showing why they are good citizens. Collect pages to create a class book. Can be published digitally or on paper. If time allows, students can share their pages with the class. / Sample page
Rubric
2.C.1.3Exemplify respect and appropriate social skills needed for working with diverse groups / Why do we have laws? How are they created? What are consequences of not having laws? How are laws enforced? / 14 / Read Aloud: “The Giant Jam Sandwich” orshow video clip of storyor use another book that shows a community working together to solve a problem.
Decide on an imaginary classroom problem (there aren’t enough pencils, the classroom library is a disaster, people aren’t cleaning up after snack, etc.)
Split the class into small groups. Each group should come up with and record a solution to the problem on the “Solving a Community Issue” page.
All groups should be working to solve the same problem.Have each group share its solution to the problem. (Hopefully there will be multiple solutions!) As a class, record the solutions and the pros/cons of each solution on the “Evaluating an Issue” worksheet. / The following lessons were adapted from
With 2nd grade unit
“The Giant Jam Sandwich”(4:03m):
The culture objective is embedded in student work throughout. / 15 / Referring back to book,The Giant Jam Sandwich, explain how the citizens in the story agreed on a way to solve their wasp problem. Tell students that this doesn’t always happen in a community (refer to the classroom discussion you just had.) Explain that when people can’t agree on how to solve a problem, it becomes an issue. The teacher explains that a public issue is a problem that affects the community as a whole and one in which people disagree on the solution.
The following is close reading and gathering of information to understand issue and multiple perspectives.
Next, the teacher does a shared reading a short scenario describing a community problem relating to dogs. Students should each have an individual copy of the scenario. The teacher guides an examination the issue and analysis of a pictograph. Model and think aloud a close reading of the scenario. First notice and annotate the parts of the scenario that are facts – several citizens have complained, mayor reported that some people have 15 dogs. What do you think about the facts? Have students turn and talk.
- What do you notice?
- What do you think?
- What do you wonder?
Then, highlight the verbs used to describe the issue. How might the author of this scenario feel about the issue?
Then analyze the pictograph of complaints. What do you notice? Think? Wonder? / See scenario attached to unit.
Why do we have laws? How are they created? What are consequences of not having laws? How are laws enforced? / 16 / Review scenario from day before and model thinking through decision-making model to understand the issue more deeply. Have students work in small groups to create possible solutions for the dog issue in Boyton, NC to then share with class.
As the groups share their solutions, students identify positive and negative consequences of each alternative using a decision making model.
Some possible ideas - is it the number of dogs or the owners care of their dogs? Leash laws? Fenced yards? Barking and or noise of many dogs? Safety and care?
Possible extended thinking and conversation might be had around the question, “What do we think the ‘real’ issue is for the town?” / Display decision-making model graphic (attached).
17 / The scenario continues as the teacher explains that the town council of the community is considering passing a law limiting the number of dogs a person can own. Students explore the question, “Should the town council pass a law limiting the number of dogs a person can own?”
Students who agree with the proposal line up on one side of the room and those who disagree with the proposal line up on the other side of the room.
Each side of the room brainstorms reasons that support their position and shares them with the other side. Students then briefly explore the connectionbetween core democratic values and public issues. Individual rights vs. the common good.
2.C&G.1.2 / Assessment / 18-19 / Student Assignment: Decide whether the town council should or should not pass a law that would limit the number of dogs a person can own. Write a complete paragraph that clearly states and supports your position with details.
Final Wrap Up / 20 / Revisit Essential Question – What are the roles and responsibilities of government? What are characteristics of good citizenship?
Optional Final Writing Assignment - Class Scrapbook.
Please note many websites require Adobe Acrobat Reader to open documents. Please make sure you have it loaded on your laptop.
Vocabulary Word / Definitiongovernment / The group of people that has power to make laws and important decisions for a community, state, or nation
community / A particular area where a group of people live or a group of people who have the same interests.
rule / A direction that guides behavior or action.
law / Any one rule that a government makes and that people must follow.
citizen / A person who is a member of a country because of being born there or being accepted as a member by law.
citizenship / The rights of being a citizen.
responsible / Expected to take care of particular things or to perform certain duties.
responsibility / Something that a person is responsible for; duty.
issue / A subject that is important to people and that people are talking about.
Name ______
Explain my Job:
My job is important because ______.
If no one did my job, then ______.
Government Job Speech Rubric
2.C&G.1Understand the purpose of governments.
SL2.1a – Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 2 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., gaining the floor in respectful ways, listening to others with care, speaking one at a time about the topics and texts under discussion).
SL2.6 - Produce complete sentences when appropriate to task and situation in order to provide requested detail or clarification.
Assignment: Students will write and present a short speech telling why their assigned government job is important to the community.
4 / 3 / 2 / 1Student speaks clearly and in complete, complex sentences.
Presents multiple, well thought out reasons to support his or her argument. / Student speaks clearly and in complete sentences.
Presents at least two solid reasons supporting his or her argument. / Student speaks clearly and in complete sentences.
Presents at least one solid reason supporting his or her argument. / Student mumbles or does not use complete sentences.
Presents no reasons for his or her argument, or the reasons presented are weak or based on opinion.
Example – Police Officer
My job is a police officer. Some of my job includes making sure that people are following laws and answering emergency calls for help. Being a police officer is important because I help people. I make sure people are safe and that they follow the rules. If no one did my job, the community might be unsafe. Everyone would do whatever they wanted and people or property might be hurt. / My job is a police officer. Some of my job includes making sure that people are following laws and answering emergency calls for help. My job is important because I make sure people are safe. If no one did my job, people might break the law or get hurt. / My job is a police officer. My job is important because I make sure people are safe. If no one did my job there wouldn’t be police officers. / My job is important because it’s cool. If no one did my job, then it would be bad.
Solving A Community Issue
Group Members: ____________
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Our solution is…______
______
______
______
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We think this is a good solution because…______
______
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Evaluating An Issue
Group / /#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
Community Members Complain About Dogs