Social Studies Skill Builders: Second Semester

Ensure your students have opportunities to work on their social studies skills. Add a page a day to their morning work packets, create a weekly social studies packet, or have them participate in a social studies center's activity. There are 90-pages of work. Enough for the second semester.

The resource was built around Pennsylvania 3rd grade social studies standards and would work best for 3rd and 4th graders but the resource is marked Not Grade Specific because there are many ways to use this. Older students can certainly use this resource if they need reviews or perhaps never had social studies instructions.

What is actually in it?

The Third Nine Weeks:

• Economics: goods and services, goods and services provided by the government, two pages about taxes, specialization, economic vocabulary, two pages about different types of labor, and tangible/intangible assets.
• History: The first three pages focus on American historical documents of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, with the next six pages focusing on identifying historical events using pictures.
• Government: Students' understanding of government is different from state to state. These pages are most likely going to be guided instruction. If you use these pages to review your government lessons, they can be independent pages. These pages focus on elections and the positions that are elected.
• Geography: Students will focus on the geography of their hometown. Students will identify physical and human geographic features, weather and extreme weather elements, and pollution.
• Vocabulary: please see the preview for the full list of vocabulary words.

The Fourth Nine Weeks:

• Economics: Goods and services provided by the government, ways to pay for things, taxes collected by the federal government, state specialization, imports and exports, local banking, savings and checking (wants and needs).
• History: The first three pages focus on American historical documents of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The following six pages focus ask on students identifying features of images or photographs from American history. Check the answer pages for help with the images.
• Government: The first three pages ask students to find the names of various elected officials. You will most definitely need to supply these or lead a lesson on how to find this information. Two pages ask students to consider the differences between the primary and general elections. Students are introduced to the electoral college map and asked to find information from it. They will need to have access to a separate political map to find state names. There are two pages of prompts about just and unjust actions.
• Geography: Students will focus on the specific physical and human geography of their hometown. Two pages ask students to look at data to find information. Two pages ask students to make corrections to sentences about American geography. One page focuses on pollution. Final geography page is about identifying capital cities.
• Vocabulary: please see the preview for the full list of vocabulary words.

Is it independent work?

It can be depending on your student's background knowledge. The first-semester bundle can absolutely be independent work. This bundle, the second semester, is more rigorous and requires students to search for answers on the internet. Depending on your students, the second-semester bundle is more likely teacher-led.

Is it compatible with TpT Easel?

No. The free sample is TpT Easel compatible but the full resources are not because they are packed in a zip file due to the answer key.

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What included:

• Third nine weeks
• Third nine weeks answers
• Fourth nine weeks
• Fourth nine weeks answers

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As mentioned above, I have a set of history skill builders as well. Check them out too!

second-semester.