Saving, Giving & Civic Action

The big idea

Your child makes a savings plan, learns smart spending tips and a save, spend and give plan, and describes the many ways people give time, talents, things and money. Then comes the Civic Action Project: your child chooses a real local issue, researches it, makes and carries out a plan, tracks the results and presents them. A year-end community project and a review of the whole year finish social studies.

Standards in plain words

• D2.Eco.1.3-5 Compares the benefits and costs of choices people make.
• D2.Eco.2.3-5 Identifies rewards and penalties (incentives) that influence the decisions people make.
• D2.Civ.6.3-5 Describes how people gain from working together, and what is hard about it, in government, workplaces, volunteer groups and families.
• D2.Civ.10.3-5 Identifies the beliefs, experiences and values behind their own and other people's views on civic issues.
• D3.1.3-5 Gathers useful information from several sources, paying attention to where each source comes from.
• D4.2.3-5 Builds explanations with reasons, correct order, examples and details.
• D4.3.3-5 Presents arguments and explanations to people outside the classroom, with posters, letters, speeches or reports.
• D4.6.3-5 Uses what they have learned to explain the problems people have faced and the chances they have created, close to home and far away.
• D4.7.3-5 Explains different ways people, alone and together, can work on local and wider problems, and predicts the results.
• D4.8.3-5 Uses fair, democratic ways to make decisions about and act on problems in their classroom or school.

Anchor texts

• Reading About Our World passages: 'Save, Spend and Give' (Week 31), 'The Journey of Your Breakfast' (Week 32), 'Kids Can Make a Difference' (Week 34) and 'Who Runs Your Town?' (Week 35)
• Video hub topics: smart spending, what civic action is, and a review of economics and money
• Local sources your child finds for the civic action issue

Watch across the unit

• Watch for: Picking a problem far too big, such as 'world hunger,' or thinking civic action must be huge.

  Try: Shrink it together: 'Where can we help with that near us, this week?' and point out that small actions still help.

• Watch for: Writing opinions as facts ('The park is the dirtiest place in town').

  Try: Ask, 'How do we know? What did we count, or who told us?' and rewrite it with a source.

• Watch for: Saying the project 'failed' because the goal was not fully met.

  Try: Point to the log total and ask, 'How many people or places did this still help?'