Title: EXPLORING CULTURES
Core Content Areas: Cultures & Societies
National Standards for Speaking/Listening, Reading, Writing and Foundational Skills are integrated in this unit.
Description of the students the plan is for Kindergarten Students but could easily be used for primary grades.
Description of the plan highlights:
Essential Question: How do cultures shape the people that are in them?
Students will learn about other cultures and how we are all special individuals through: Zink the Zebra Girl Scout program, books, videos about cultures on United Streaming, BookFlix (an online book site), ePals(so far we have a French class- co-teaching project), Pennies for Patients Service Learning Project. Student will be able to compare their traditions to those they learn about in this unit. ELL students and families are another avenue to utilize. They could be guest speakers or send in artifacts.
To culminate the unit students will share some traditions that they like that happen at school and/or in the classroom. They will participate in the class, Winter Celebration, which is planned by a parent with students selecting songs to sing and food to eat. Students may select some food/recipes from other cultures to try.
Guiding Questions:
1. What is a culture?
SS-P-CS-U-1 – students will understand that culture is a system of beliefs, knowledge, institutions, customs/traditions, languages and skills shared by a group of people.
SS-P-CS-U-4 – Students will understand that a variety of factors promote cultural diversity in a community.
2. How do people, and groups of people, interact and get along?
SS-P-CS-U-3 – Students will understand that interactions among individuals and groups assume various forms (e.g., compromise, cooperation, conflict, competition).
3. How are families different?
Key learner outcomes
Unit Objectives:
Students will know:
- People have customs and traditions.
- There are cultural elements (beliefs, traditions, languages)
- Various forms of interactions (cooperation)
Students will understand:
- Customs and traditions can be different
- The importance of appreciating other cultures
Students will be able to do:
- Identify and describe a family tradition
- Describe forms of cooperation
- Identify appropriate conflict resolution strategy (cooperation)
(Students will apply map skills previously learned during Geography Unit).
(Students will use digital media to gain knowledge about culture).
LEARNING TARGETS
- I know people have customs and traditions.
- I know there are cultural elements.
- I can cooperate with other people. (interact)
- I can understand that customs and traditions can be different.
- I can understand the importance of appreciating other cultures.
- I can identify and describe a family tradition.
- I can identify customs and traditions of another culture.
- I can compare cultures.
- I can describe how to cooperate.
- I can identify an appropriate conflict strategy (cooperation)
Description of how you will measure if the plan was successful
Success will be measured by student participation during: class discussion, ePal letter writing, skype sessions, and other presentations. They will be expected to share reflections on what they learn during daily lessons which could occur through Writer’s Notebooks and oral class discussions. Students should demonstrate respect and cooperation with each other at the end of this unit and be able to reflect on strategies to get along better.
Success will also be measured on how well students perform on the common assessment. The class average on the multiple choice should be 80% and on the open response average should be 3.
I love your plan! Culture is so hard to teach to young children because of their limited experiences in the world. We always did something like this around the holidays. We made fake passports and had the children travle from class to class, where each classroom was a different country or culture.
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