How to Use Where I Live: CT
Welcome to Where I Live: Connecticut. This resource offers educators and students readable materials to support the Connecticut Social Studies Frameworks adopted in February 2015 for third grade, “Our State and Our City/Town: Yesterday and Today.” It is designed to be the foundation upon which each district or school develops its own curriculum. The editors worked with teachers and curriculum specialists to create accessible content that supports the Social Studies frameworks. However, you may find that additional resources are needed to teach basic concepts.
NOTE: The book is now available on the NIMAC portal.
We hope that Where I Live: Connecticut inspires students to ask questions and wonder about their home state and its place in the world. The editors worked with teachers and curriculum specialists to choose topics that provide a balanced overview and background knowledge of the state’s history, economy, geography, and civics. This resource reflects Connecticut’s diversity and a multitude of voices and builds on the second grade framework’s theme “Making a Difference.” Students will learn that individuals from all walks of life have made—and continue to make—important contributions to our state.
2. Applying disciplinary concepts and tools
3. Evaluating sources and using evidence
4. Communicating conclusions and taking informed action
NEW! Read-Aloud Videos
Videos of each chapter read aloud. With closed-captioning, students can see the words as they're read aloud. Find them at the top of each chapter in the For Students section. Rolling out in Fall 2018
Because Where I Live was designed to support the Inquiry Arc, you will find question-mark symbols throughout the text. We encourage educators to use these prompts as an opportunity for students to generate their own questions, as suggested by the first dimension of the Inquiry Arc. However you choose to teach students about asking questions, Where I Live is designed to support student acquisition of this skill.
We recognize that students will generate questions that this text may not answer. Therefore, Where I Live is designed to be used in concert with WhereILiveCT.org, its companion website. On the For Students tab, students will find additional content for each chapter written at the third-grade reading level. Many of these essays were adapted from articles published in Connecticut Explored. In order to revise them to a third-grade reading level, some of the content has been eliminated. The original articles are available and linked for teachers’ use. We hope to expand content on WhereILiveCT.org over time; however, we know we will not answer all questions. Our hope is that as students become interested and engaged in the topics, they will naturally stretch themselves in pursuit of answers to their own questions.
In addition to the suggestions of places to pause and generate questions, we have also provided explicit questions for teachers so that this resource also serves as a means to work toward the Connecticut Core Standards informational reading skills. We have purposefully included text features, vocabulary, comparisons and contrasts, and opportunities to make generalizations and see relationships between historical events. These are all skills within the third-grade Connecticut Core Standards.
Ashley Callan, Melanie Meehan, and Elizabeth Normen
