US Symbol Stories
Grades: K-2
US Symbol Stories
After learning about important US symbols, students become one of the symbols and share information about the history of the symbol and its importance.
Engage
Ask your class if they can find or name symbols in the world around them. After students identify a symbol, ask them to talk about what the symbol means or represents. The goal is to get students to understand that we use visual symbols to represent ideas and communicate these ideas quickly.
Introduce students to important symbols in the United States, such as:
Create a word wall to help students identify and learn terms connected to their exploration. Depending on the age of your learners, your wall might include words like arch, statue, monument, freedom, and strength.
Create
Assign a US symbol you have studied to each student in your class. Choose symbols you think will interest each unique learner, as well as how accessible the information is to each student’s emerging reading level.
Have students complete an Empathy Map that shows what their symbol sees, hears, thinks, and feels.
When empathy maps are complete, it is time to begin telling their story.
Ask students to draw a picture of the symbol and write a story about it. Depending on the age of your students, you may want to use sentence starters to support their writing, such as:
- “I am the __________________ (symbol).”
- “I represent ___________.”
- “When people see me, they think of _________.”
Students can refer back to words they collected earlier, like freedom, strength, independence, and equality.
Share
When work is done, celebrate learning and also take time to solidify and reflect on it. If learners have created a single page, display the pages in a US Symbols gallery. If you are creating a gallery in the classroom or combine individual student pages together to form a class resource, you can print, export to PDF, or embed it on your classroom web page.
If students have created multiple pages, print their work as a booklet they can read independently to build fluency.
Assessment
Use the contents of each student's empathy map to have specific conversations with each learner about what their symbol might see, hear, feel and think. Have a conversation with each student to ensure the information they have found is accurate for their symbol and the meaning it portrays.
The final stories are great learning artifacts you can use as summative assessments, but the conversations you have during the process will provide a more complete picture of their learning. Ask students to explain their writing and illustrations as they are working. Prompt with questions about their story to encourage them to write and draw more detailed information.
Resources
Library of Congress - Symbols of the United States
BrainPOP Jr. - US Symbols
Common Core State Standards
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.K.7
With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the text in which they appear (e.g., what person, place, thing, or idea in the text an illustration depicts).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.1.6
Distinguish between information provided by pictures or other illustrations and information provided by the words in a text.