what makes a city....

I teach Grade One in a town of 6000-and-some people. The nearest city of any size is 500 km away. Most of my kids have been to the city at least once, but most likely just to the (West Edmonton) Mall. Or maybe to see family.

Our Social Studies curriculum calls for an understanding of rural and urban communities. We spent quite a bit of time looking at pictures of cities and talking about what it means that a city is "bigger" than a town, working on the general concept of more. More people, which means more houses and apartment buildings for them to live in, which means more roads for the houses to be on, which means more cars, buses and trains. And so on. More stores. More gas stations. More signs. More traffic lights. More parking lots. You  name it.

For our "Building Things" unit in Science, we learned to make pop-ups. So we used our pop-up-making skills, markers, scrap paper, and small yellow stickers (for windows) to make little three-dimensional urban landscapes.

Then we did some writing. The kids drew cityscapes, then finished the sentence: "A city has lots of ________." (Or wrote a sentence of their own.) It seems that lots of cities have super heroes, by the way. And other people standing on the tops of high buildings. With parachutes.

(Not sure if that is in the Social Studies curriculum, strictly speaking.)

"I saw one of my cousins at the hospital."