Grade 2 Social Studies Minnesota Standards

Civic Skills: Apply civic reasoning and demonstrate civic skills for the purpose of informed and engaged lifelong civic participation.

Democratic Values and Principles: Explain democratic values and principles that guide governments, societies and communities. Analyze the tensions within the United States constitutional government.

Rights and Responsibilities: Explain and evaluate rights, duties and responsibilities in democratic society.

Governmental Institutions and Political Processes: Explain and evaluate processes, rules and laws of United States governmental institutions at local, state and federal levels and within Tribal Nations.

Tribal Nations: Evaluate the unique political status, trust relationships and governing structures of sovereign Tribal Nations and the United States.

Economic Inquiry: Use economic models and reasoning and data analysis to construct an argument and propose a solution related to an economic question. Evaluate the impact of the proposed solution on various communities that would be affected.

Fundamental Economic Concepts: Analyze how scarcity and artificial shortages force individuals, organizations, communities, and governments to make choices and incur opportunity costs. Analyze how the decisions of individuals, organizations, communities, and governments affect economic equity and efficiency.

Personal Finance: Apply economic concepts and models to develop individual and collective financial goals and strategies for achieving these goals, taking into consideration historical and contemporary conditions that either inhibit or advance the creation of individual and generational wealth.

Geospatial Skills and Inquiry: Apply geographic tools, including geospatial technologies, and geographic inquiry to solve spatial problems.

Places and Regions: Describe places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures.

Human-Environment Interaction: Evaluate the relationship between humans and the environment, including climate change.

Context, Change, and Continuity: Ask historical questions about context, change and continuity in order to identify and analyze dominant and nondominant narratives about the past.

Historical Perspectives: Identify diverse points of view, and describe how one’s frame of reference influences historical perspective.

Historical Sources and Evidence: Investigate a variety of historical sources by: a) analyzing primary and secondary sources; b) identifying perspectives and narratives that are absent from the available sources; and c) interpreting the historical context, intended audience, purpose, and author’s point of view of these sources.

Causation and Argumentation: Integrate evidence from multiple historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument or compelling narrative about the past.

Identity: Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender. Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories and histories have been marginalized, erased, or ignored.

Identity: Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender. Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories and histories have been marginalized, erased, or ignored.

Resistance: Describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally. Identify strategies or times that have resulted in lasting change. Organize with others to engage in activities that could further the rights and dignity of all.

Ways of Knowing and Methodologies: Use ethnic and Indigenous studies methods and sources in order to understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression and apply lessons from the past that could eliminate historical and contemporary injustices.

Ways of Knowing and Methodologies: Use ethnic and Indigenous studies methods and sources in order to understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression and apply lessons from the past that could eliminate historical and contemporary injustices.

Ethnic Studies

Investigate what characteristics allow an item to function as currency.

Compare and contrast different ways of knowing, seeing, and understanding land use, rights, and ownership over time.

Describe how tribal government structures govern the affairs of the nation.

Compare and contrast student rules, rights and responsibilities at school and at home. Explain the importance of following rules. Discuss what to do when a rule is not fair.

Describe how a community may consist of multiple cultures, identifying how power is shared among cultural communities. Identify power, cooperation and conflict in multicultural communities.

Ask and answer spatial questions about physical and human characteristics in the environment.

Explore the importance of first peoples’/Indigenous peoples’ interactions to land, water and the nonhuman world.

Provide an example of an opportunity cost, which is the next best alternative when a choice is made.

Given a goal and several alternative choices to reach that goal, select the best choice and explain why.

Identify a level of government and describe the role it serves in the lives of community members.

Citizenship and Government

Use historical sources to investigate how the relationship between people and the environment has changed over time. Identify whose voices and perspectives are represented in the sources and whose are absent.

Describe daily life for Minnesota Dakota or Anishinaabe peoples in different times, including before European contact and today.

Create sketch maps and use these, as well as fixed and dynamic maps, to locate places. Describe locations on these maps in relation to other places.

Describe ways that the local environment influences people and their actions and how human actions impact the local environment, including air, water, land and wildlife.

Geography

Use and create calendars to identify days, weeks, months, years and seasons. Identify how the environment can impact how we measure time and create calendars.

History

Economics

Propose an idea to improve the relationship between humans and the environment.

Describe how voting and elections exemplify democratic principles, including, but not limited to, equality, freedom, fairness, respect for individual rights, citizen participation, majority rule and accepting the results of an election.

Describe how the culture of a community today reflects the history, daily life or beliefs of its people.

Identify how different groups have worked to protect the land and natural resources.

Demonstrate voting skills by participating in a vote and identifying the rules that keep the voting process fair.