Rural Urban and Suburban Communities Unit!

Recently, I completed a unit on Rural, Urban and Suburban Communities with my 3rd grade students that went amazing and I wanted to share it with you all. The third grade social studies curriculum that the school uses in 3rd where I was student teaching focuses on all different kinds of communities. We had previously just finished a unit on different communities based on their geographical region. Now I am very passionate about Social Studies, so I always love to focus in on it and put a lot of time into developing great Social Studies Units!

I started the unit off with a pre-assessment using a community sort with a list of words to describe the 3 types of communities and the students had to sort them into where they thought they would belong. I had them turn the sorts in so I could look over them and then as a class, we completed a sort on a giant piece of paper together to figure out what went in each.

We spent two days learning about each community. For all of the lessons, I would teach with a power point presentation of pictures describing what I was talking about and a few key points. For each lesson, we would spend the first day learning about the general facts of each community and then the second day we would look farther into either the history or the life of that particular community. For Rural we looked at the different kinds of farming, for Urban we explored the history and growth of a city and for Suburban we looked at how one of the first suburbs was created. On day 1 for each community we would fill out the corresponding pages in the workbook that I created. They would draw a picture to represent the community and then write what the community looks like and interesting facts that they learned about the community.

On the second day for each community, they would work on adding to their Rural, Suburban and Urban mobiles that we hung in the hallway once they were completed, showing how communities can be centered around a city and then grow out to the suburban area and then the rural area. My students were so creative with this project and they came out great.

The final part of this unit was making a triarama. My students thought this was the coolest idea ever and were so excited about making them. I got this idea from Buzzing About Second Grade. This project took two days for my students to complete. For the directions on how to make them check out the above link. I allowed my students to use any craft supply we had for this as well as having things like paint chips and cotton balls. I created an example of one to set the expectations for my students that looked like this: