Local Culture Guides

Getting Started: How do you find your way into and identify local culture? How does a teacher get started with local culture studies? This brief document suggests some simple ways and strategies to begin incorporating local culture learning into your classroom.

Kids’ Guide to Local Culture will help students observe, interview, and understand people. It includes tools and skills for people watching and ways of presenting their research. The main part of this guide is a list of some of the things students will see in their communities (what we call cultural elements), such as foodways, celebrations, and recreation. Under each cultural element, students find examples, ways of thinking, and ideas for projects.

Teachers’ Guide to Local Culture provides background information to help teachers use the Kids Guide to Local Culture with their students, and includes 8 different Quick Start lesson plans and accompanying activities to support each lesson. With a few basic tools, you can teach every standard in the social studies curriculum and connect existing texts and units to local cultural environments.