Changing Families & Traditions

I had a lot of fun with my social studies unit in my grade 2/3 classroom. We had the opportunity to build family trees, create Venn diagrams comparing traditions, creating anchor charts about what makes our families special/unique. Overall, it was a great success.

My favourite part, however, was the culminating task. I have added some pictures below of each of the parts of the assignment.

The original goal was for students to choose a tradition from another culture that they wanted to explore. However, due to lack of time (4-week placements fly by), I asked each child to select a tradition that was important to them. They were then required to fill out the outline, with the important information they wanted to include in their final product, (this was also a helpful tool for me when it came to grading as sometimes it is hard to decipher exactly what was drawn).

Once the students had finished their outlines (see below), they were to show it to me and then I would give them the green light to begin their rough drafts. I didn’t include the images of the rough drafts in this post. As they finished their rough draft, once again, they were asked to come and show me before moving on. I would give verbal feedback about what could be added/changed and then gave them the green light for their good copy (see below).

Instructions for Keeping Quilt

Outline of Keeping Quilt

Examples of Completed Keeping Quilt

Examples of Rubrics for Keeping Quilt

Finally, I included the rubric that went with the activity. Both rubrics are tied to the two examples I have shown above in the images in order to give an idea as to what I was looking for/expecting from the students.

**Part of the rubric mentions a writing portion, each student was asked to write a short sentence as to why this tradition was important to them. Once again, not all students got to this portion due to lack of time.