"This is My House"

Sometimes, the best ideas are the ones that come to you at the last minute. Like, as you're walking to pick your class up from recess and think to yourself, "Oh shoot, I need a social studies lesson" and you have about 6 minutes to come up with it in your brain as you're walking your class back to the classroom (while also tying shoes, reminding students to grab their jackets, and solving some crisis that happened on the playground). Sure, sometimes those ideas crash and burn. But today was not one of those days!

As a grade level, my kinder team has developed a social studies curriculum that focuses on students learning all about themselves and their various communities. So in this lesson, I wanted to focus on their idea of home- what does a home look like, who lives there, etc. This is especially poignant in my school community, where different cultural expectations and the impact of poverty often situate families into non-standard living situations. I wanted to address these differences without judgement, and help students consider their own home communities.

To kick off the lesson, we had a class meeting about seeing things that are the same and different. Maybe it's how people dress, or what kind of food they eat at lunch. Then I introduced our read aloud text, "This is My House", and scaffolded by saying that this book would show lots of different ways that people lived around the world. During the read aloud, students could show a hand signal if they saw or heard something that was the same as their home, or a different hand signal if what they saw or heard was different.

During the read aloud, we read each page and quickly reflected, asking ourselves, "Is this the same or different than my house?" At first, everything they saw was the same (typical kinders), but then as the locations of each house changed, we noticed how climate might impact a house. Or maybe whole families lived together. The text even talks about families living in their cars and people who live on the street. Quick tip: It would be prudent to do your homework on your students, making sure you knew what issues this text may bring up, and scaffold or support appropriately.

After our read aloud, we moved into our art extension. I wanted students to each make a visual representation of their houses so that we could compare and contrast as a class. I demonstrated with the whole class, using different colored construction paper to make the front door of my apartment building. Knowing that many of my students also live in apartments, as opposed to houses, I wanted to show how they could convey their home even when it was just a front door. We've also recently been learning shapes, so it was a great review of how we could use different shapes to show parts of our houses. Then we went back to our desks to make our own, and the kids took off!

Was this a perfect lesson? No. Was it a complete approach to talking about a giant topic? Nope. But did it engage my students in thinking about their own homes, similarities and differences between each other, and begin a conversation about why things may look different for different people? Yes. And that's what social studies in kinder should be, an introduction to seeing and thinking about their world and their role in it!

Teach on!

Ms. G

#socialstudies #art #readaloud #same #different #criticalthinking #shapes #kindergarten