Standard 1: Foundations of Government, Law and the American Political System

This lesson will allow the students to explain the difference between rules and laws, their purpose, and their role in the home, school, and community. Students will sequentially order events that occur at school using primary sources on a timeline while identifying rules or laws for each event.  The students will complete a matching activity on the purpose of rules at school.

Type: Lesson Plan

Help your students understand the importance of following sequences as well as following the law in this immersive lesson.  Students will play a class game of “Bus Ride” to identify a set of defined steps for riding a bus safely as well as being introduced to the term “algorithm”.  The teacher will then continue the lesson by helping students connect the idea of sequencing to rules and laws. Finally, students will play the Scratch game “Be-Beep!” using arrow keys to safely drive a virtual “bus” full of school children to their school without breaking any traffic laws.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be introduced to Scratch and why rules are important. On Scratch, students will log in, choose a sprite, and select the community location they will focus on for their project in this integrated unit. This is part 1 of a 3 lesson unit.

Type: Lesson Plan

Why are rules important?  Have your students ever wondered why we have rules at school? In this interactive computer science lesson, students will play a game of charades to distinguish between responsible behavior (rule-following) and irresponsible behavior (rule-breaking) by acting out classroom rules with picture cards and then play a Scratch game to apply computational thinking as they identify and sort appropriate behavior at home and school.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will create a simple Scratch coding program to explain a rule within their school community. Students will upload a digital photo for the background, choose Sprites and write and voice their own narration.  

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will explore the differences between rules and laws within their community. After participating in whole group discussions and sharing examples of rules and laws, students will be tasked with planning a Scratch program that exemplifies a rule being followed at school. Students will use available technology for appropriate images to be used in their Scratch coding project. This lesson is part one of a series. The series covers the planning and creation of a block code project using Scratch programming. 

Type: Lesson Plan

The purpose of this lesson is for students to explain the difference between rules and laws and the purpose of rules and laws in the home, school, and community while being able to explain how rules affect their daily lives.  Students will compare rules and laws now with rules and laws from the past to be able to compare and contrast two texts on the same topic.

Type: Lesson Plan

In lesson 6 of this unit, the teacher will continue reading A Picture Book of Benjamin Franklin. Civics will be integrated throughout as students learn about the purpose of rules and laws in school, home, and community. Students will identify relevant details in order to make a connection with Benjamin Franklin, who stood up against a law that he felt was unfair, by writing their own opinion pieces about a fictitious rule.

This unit is focused on identifying Benjamin Franklin as the topic of the text. Civics is integrated through understanding that Benjamin Franklin represents the United States. Students will explore life in the 1700’s to gain background knowledge. Teacher will create an ongoing timeline to document the major events in Ben’s life as key details. Students will solve a real world problem through invention, create a newspaper article to spread news, write both an expository and opinion piece. The assessment for the unit will be a kite that is a graphic organizer for students to identify the topic and relevant details in a text.

This resource uses a book that is on the Florida Department of Education's reading list. This book is not provided with this resource.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will explore how to be safe around water and the purpose of rules at home, school, and in the community in this integrated lesson plan. Students will learn about ways to be safe around different types of water by reading a passage and posted rules for different bodies of water. They will decide between examples and wrong examples of water safety and then write their own rule for water safety.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this integrated lesson plan, students will work collaboratively in guided partner groups to identify responsible and irresponsible characteristics of students in a school community. Using computational thinking language of if/then conditional statements, the students will sort the information regarding responsible and irresponsible citizens in a useful order.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will analyze the main character’s actions, connect the character’s irresponsible character traits to responsible character traits, and create a scenario in which people can act responsibly by following the rules within the school community, in this integrated ELA and Civics lesson.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series based on the book What If Everybody Did That?

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will describe the main character using adjectives, determine if his actions throughout the community are responsible or irresponsible, and generate a list of responsible citizenship traits, in this integrated ELA and Civics lesson plan.

This is part 1 of 3 in a series of lessons based on the book What If Everybody Did That?

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson plan, students will explore the presence and function of rules and laws in their lives. They will provide examples of how rules and laws impact individuals and why we all have a responsibility to support the safety and happiness of the community.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson plan, students explain the similarities and differences between rules and laws and explore the purpose for rules and laws in their daily life. 

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will describe how not having rules and laws impacts both the community and number order when they compare numbers with and without place value rules.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson plan, students will learn about rules and laws and the roles that they play in their daily life by creating a learning booklet.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will learn the difference between rights and responsibilities. They will explore different rights and responsibilities that they have in the school community, as well as opportunity costs when they must fulfill their responsibilities as students.

Type: Lesson Plan

Explore the history of some counting systems and learn why rules are needed, even in math, with this video.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

This Grade 1 Civics Family Guide provides some ideas and activities to support civics education when at home, out and about, and in the community. The activities provided align to the civics learning benchmarks within Standard 1 at this grade level.

Type: Teaching Idea

Florida students in kindergarten to twelfth grade study ‘American Civics and Government’ in all public schools across the state. This video informs families how they can support Florida’s K-12 civics and government education initiative at home.

Type: Video/Audio/Animation