US Regions

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Home : 2003 : February : 1

US Regions
By Carolyn

I can only allocate one day per week to social studies, because of the required amount of time each day for reading, writing, and math. I have done the following to help keep the kids on top of social studies, both history
and geography:
1. Go to the back of the social studies textbook. Do you have a listing of all of the states by alphabetical order, complete with population and other data? We have this. I had my students pull out population data for let's say California and Colorado. They write down the populations, then they compare the numbers to write which has a greater population, using the

greater than, less than symbols. They are funny when I first try doing something like this with them. They'll say something like: Is this math, or is it social studies? My response is that it is both. They gradually get used to my "crazy" ideas. You can do this with a number of states by region. Also, they could take the states from a region and rank them by order from the largest population to the smallest. They could also try to describe why the populations of these states may be small or very large. If you don't have this in the back of your textbook, you could photocopy it.

2. We do a lot of graphs, too. I had my students complete a double bar graph for morning work which compared the North and the South in the Civil War.

3. We do story problems relating to history. I am planning to have my kids do some for morning work on Monday. I also have my kids make up story problems from data that they have collected. They have trouble making up story problems, so you have to teach them by modeling quite a few.