Gr. 1 - Urban Planners

This age is passionate to be hands on about learning. Creating opportunities to become investigators, engineers, and designers can be an effective way to dive into real world problems in PBL. The Urban Planners unit focuses on the spaces that we occupy and examines why our public areas look and function the way they do. Students collaboratively design, revise, create, and reason to build their very own cardboard city. Curricular connections - applied design skills and technology 1  

Big idea

• Skills can be developed through play.

Applied Design

Ideating

• Identify needs and opportunities for designing, through exploration

• Generate ideas from their experiences and interests

• Add to others’ ideas

• Choose an idea to pursue

Making

• Choose tools and materials

• Make a product using known procedures or through modelling of others

• Use trial and error to make changes, solve problems, or incorporate new ideas from self or 

others

Sharing

• Decide on how and with whom to share their product

• Demonstrate their product, tell the story of designing and making their product, and explain

how their product contributes to the individual, family, community, and/or environment

• Use personal preferences to evaluate the success of their design solutions

• Reflect on their ability to work effectively both as individuals and collaboratively in a group

Applied Skills

• Use materials, tools, and technologies in a safe manner in both physical and digital environments

• Develop their skills and add new ones through play and collaborative work

Social Studies 1 

Big ideas

• We shape the local environment, and the local environment shapes who we are and how we live. 

• Healthy communities recognize and respect the diversity of individuals and care for the local

environment.

Curricular competencies

• Explore different perspectives on people, places, issues, or events in their lives (perspective)

• Use Social Studies inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze ideas; and communicate findings and decisions

• Explain the significance of personal or local events, objects, people, or places (significance)

Content 

• characteristics of the local community that provide organization and meet the needs of the community

• diverse cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives within the local and other communities

• relationships between a community and its environment

• natural and human-made features of the local environment