Iris and Walter: Urban and Rural Communities plus a Vocabulary Power Point FREEBIE

The first unit in my Reading Street Curriculum was "Iris and Walter" by Elissa Haden Guest.

Despite the current movement away from basal readers, I actually am really loving my Reading Street curriculum right now because it not only has great stories, but I am totally able to use the anthology as a shared reading basis for my Reading Workshop which is awesome!! I'm planning on posting about how I incorporate the reading curriculum with the workshop model soon.

Anyhoo, the main social studies concept from this unit was the concept of rural vs urban communities. Iris moves from the city and finds country life to be sad and boring until she finds a new friend, Walter.

After reading the textbook story, I gathered some pictures from good ole Google Image of urban and rural communities around the world. We went through the slideshow together, pointing out things we saw that were similar and different about the various pictures. Then, while the power point was on repeat cycle, students worked with their reading partner to find similarities and differences between rural and urban communities. Then the kiddos brought their sticky notes down to the rug and we learned about Venn Diagrams using their sticky note ideas (Sticky Notes are one of my favorite formative assessment strategies!!) If I was more on top of it, I would have had blue in the middle (Yellow and green make blue, duh!) but maybe next year! Also, the sticky notes were not very sticky so the pictures aren't fabulous, but you can see the work!

Here is what some of the smart little kiddos came up with.

Rural: "People, cars, skyscrapers"

"Cow, horses, houses, school buses"

"Pigs, horses"

Urban: "A lot of people and buildings"

"Cars, skyscrapers, Space Needle"

"Urban places have subways and skyscrapers"

"A lot of houses"

Both: "Houses, ambulances"

"Trees, schools, houses"

"Buses, schools"

"Moms, dads"

Students then did a word sort of urban and rural vocabulary words in their reading response journals and we read two of my favorite books about this topic. We of course read "Town Mouse and Country Mouse" by Jan Brett.

And one of my favorite books of all time, "The Little House" by Virginia Lee Burton. I would spend hours staring at the fabulous illustrations in this book when I was a child so I of course wanted to share it with my class. Oh nostalgia!

We also read Scholastic News which had a whole issue related to this vocabulary issue! The issue compared and contrasted urban, suburban, and rural schools. I get Scholastic News for my students every year and there is some weird sort of Scholastic News Magic where their issues almost always coincide with what we are learning about in class. Plus, they are aligned to Common Core now which is fabulous!! I love Scholastic News!

I'd love to share my Rural and Urban Power Point and Social Study Word Sort with you for FREE!! Find it here Rural or Urban Vocabulary Mini-Unit FREEBIE

Happy Day!