Geography
• Use grid coordinates to locate features of local areas on maps.
• Create a map of school, neighborhood, and community.
• Identify locations suited to specific activities or functions.
• Construct a community model and incorporate local geographic and human features.
• Use samples from local ecosystems to convey information about ecosystems and their changes.
• Investigate origins of local street names.
• Plan changes in street names, community features, and structures to be more consistent with the cultural, historical, and geographic features of the local area.
• Visit a local community. Compare and contrast it with own community.
• Develop reciprocal relationship with students from another community. Create projects to teach students from other areas about the cultural and physical systems of communities.
• Investigate physical systems (e.g., water cycle, erosion, and glaciation).
• Identify and describe physical landforms in your area, including how they were formed or changed by physical systems or events (e.g., rivers, glaciers, earthquakes, volcanoes).
• Examine different habitats of your local area.
• Examine local resources and the ways they are used in local communities.
• List different modes of transporting goods, information, and services in your community and what types of jobs are needed for them.
• Use technology to gather, sort, and organize information for a variety of purposes.
• Judge the accuracy, value, and relevance of information gathered from a variety of sources (e.g., media, newspapers, Internet).
Government
• Participate in community.
• Investigate current events.
• Develop rules for the classroom.
• Elect class officers to establish rules, consequences, and conflict resolution.
• Identify and explain an issue of public concern that is a personal interest (e.g., a bike trail or nature trail).
• Determine how the demand for products from other places in the world changes or influences a region (e.g., sport fishing on the Kenai River vs. commercial fishing in Cook Inlet, logging vs. no logging on the Kenai Peninsula).
• Examine the structure of the Kenai Peninsula Borough government.
• Identify a school problem. Research its history and present a plan of action to the principal or parent group.
• Learn about service learning.
• Understand local election/voting process.
• Discuss how the development of natural resources has changed on the Kenai Peninsula (e.g., fishing, coal, gold, oil, tourism).
• Determine why major regional industrial centers are located on river systems or along coastlines.
• Practice conflict resolution.
History
• Describe and present family history in a picture timeline, drawing, or an oral presentation.
• Discuss key historical events in the geographic regions of the United States (Northeast, Southwest, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific).
• Identify the Native groups that live within the regions of the U.S., including the study of regional art and music.
• Discuss Native American perspectives through literature.
• Interview a senior citizen to obtain understandings of life in the past.
• Identify the Native groups in Southcentral Alaska.
• Analyze the cause and effect of key turning points in history.
• Visit a museum and identify subsistence items that have been used for trade.
• Examine the consequences of Russian settlement in Southcentral Alaska.
• Learn about significant local people, past and present, and describe how they have shaped transportation, communication, or public utilities in the community.
• Identify a famous historical person and, through research, create and perform a character speech in costume.
• Become a historical figure and give an oral presentation.
• Consider a critical issue of a region and discuss various aspects, pro and con, of the issue (e.g., spruce beetle). |