This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the Kindergarten Social Studies content.

This resource accompanies our Rethink Kindergarten Social Studies Geography unit. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning.

This unit was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for Kindergarten Social Studies in Geography.

Students will explore the idea that they are interconnected to many larger communities (classroom, school, family, neighborhood, city, world, etc.) They will also explore the need for these communities to have systems in place where each person plays a role in making the systems function. We will specifically explore the need for, and create, systems that allow us to work, learn and play together in our kindergarten classroom. The creation of rules, jobs, and routines will be the core of this unit. Documenting and sharing these systems will be the product.

The NC Kids' Exploration Journals are a fun educational tool to help youth explore their communities and natural surroundings! Each journal contains: 18 multidisciplinary activities with guided prompts, 6 lined journal pages for recording observations and reflections, and 4 blank pages for individual creativity.

The digital versions of the journal are designed to be printed out for students either as individual activities or in its entirety so that they can explore their school yard, local park, or own backyard. Though designed for 1st - 5th-graders, older audiences may enjoy them too! They are also available in both English and Spanish languages.

While supplies last, hard copies of the journals are currently available for free to teachers by contacting karen.ipock@ncdcr.gov.

In third grade you learned about the geography of the state of Michigan. You may have studied the geography of Michigan by learning about what makes Michigan special. This year, in studying the geography of the United States, you will explore a similar question. It is centered around what makes the country in which we live special.

In this lesson, students listen to a story, then either draw a picture or write a new story about the benefits of trees and differing points of views about trees. Students then create a rhyme or song about how the trees make them feel. Finally, students consider how trees in rural forests are beneficial by comparing illustrations representing a tree in an urban forest and a tree in a rural forest.