Lesson: My House
Source: Philadelphia World Heritage Tool Kit
Created by: Susan Holt, Plymouth Meeting Friends
Subjects: Social Studies, Reading, Writing
Grade Levels: 1-2
View or download this Lesson Plan.
Overview: Students will visit Philadelphia and learn about the early housing of the city. They will discuss how housing has changed and how their own homes compare to the early homes in Philadelphia. Students will read My House by Arthur Dorros. They will investigate the different types of housing in which children live around the world and discuss possible reasons for variations and similarities in houses. (For instance: “Why is that house on stilts?” might lead us to investigate the geography of New Guinea.) Students will write a descriptive piece about their own home and draw their house, apartment, room, condo, etc. Teacher can discuss with students what “home” means to them and if they have more than one “home” (ex. Mom’s house, Dad’s house, Grandma’s house), make sure they can incorporate those homes into the lesson.
Objectives: Students will become more aware of how children live around the world and describe how housing around the world can be vastly different or very similar to their own. Most importantly, students will learn that culture, environment and necessity determine housing structure as much as available capital, and no one way of living is better than another.
The Philadelphia World Heritage Tool Kit
This lesson is one of 29 lessons (K-12, all subjects) in the Philadelphia World Heritage Tool Kit. The goal of the Tool Kit is to help educators and their students develop a transnational analysis in their classrooms by using complex themes of world heritage as a framework to understand global regions across disciplines. These themes include shared architectural, cultural, economic, environmental, political, recreational, religious, and social heritage features. Real teachers created these lessons and based their work on “best practices” that reflect student collaboration and the broad goals of young people in ways that support care and understanding of others who may be very different in background and history.