Looking Closely at our Government Leaders

Hello, friends!  Keeping with the election season, my second graders started their study of government this week.  We started an amazing social students PBL titled "Who's the Boss?" (more on that to come!), so it was only natural to integrate our ELA block with what we were focusing on in social studies.  Integration = deeper learning and less wasted time! Win, win!

We started our week by working together to closely read informational texts about different government functions and laws.  My school uses Step Up to Writing for non-fiction writing, so I used the topic and star ideas outline to decompose the texts together and get students to focus on the topic sentence, main ideas, elaborations, and conclusion sentence.

Here is our article underlined with the Step Up to Writing color color-coding.

After underlining the article, we used the Step Up to Writing outline to understand how a non-fiction text is structured.  This is an example of our shared outline.

Students also got the chance to read and analyze their own article (with a partner, of course!) using the same technique I modeled to the entire class.  Here you can see what I gave the students to read, underline, and then fill in their own Step Up to Writing Outline:

After all of their hard work, my kiddos needed a bit of movement and hands-on learning, so we went on a non-fiction text feature scavenger hunt through different non-fiction texts.  They LOVED going from book to book and searching for these different text features!

My sweet students finished their first week of learning about government by researching a government leader and then writing their own non-fiction article about their leader.  I used the website Britannica Elementary which is AMAZING for second graders - it reads the kid-friendly articles out loud, so every student is able to understand what they're reading (it saves SO many raised hands and confused students - believe me!).

Once the kiddos were experts on their government leader, they filled in their own Step Up to Writing outline and then wrote their article about their leader.

We used Google Draw for their final draft, so you know they loved getting to work on their Chromebooks, change fonts, add pictures, and make the background color "perfect"! I was super impressed with their final products and it made this teacher's heart happy to hear students saying things like, "What should our caption for this photo be?" and "Let's search for the definition of our bolded word!".

Look at this awesome 2nd grade writing!

These students truly grasped these non-fiction text features and are now experts on their government leaders!  This entire unit is available HERE.  If you don't use Step Up to Writing, no worries!  I included another outline template that any classroom could utilize.

I hope this unit overview is helpful!  Let me know how you introduce government to your students!  Stay tuned for a look at our "Who's the Boss" PBL that's coming soon...