Alabama Social Studies SS24.HG.11a
The Standard
- SS24.HG.11
- Analyze how the economic and cultural activities of urban places shape surrounding regions.
Explain how urban sprawl affects a city, the communities around it, and the natural environment.
2024 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies · Migration and Settlement
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students trace what happens when homes, stores, and roads spread beyond a city’s built-up area. They explain effects on city services, nearby communities, and land or water.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given a before-and-after map, a student can point to new development and explain why the city may need longer sewer lines, a nearby town may see more traffic, and habitat may shrink. They identify who experiences each effect.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may call any population growth sprawl, even when new homes fill vacant city lots. They may focus only on the city, or say nature is harmed without naming a change such as lost farmland or increased runoff.
How to Assess It
- Exit ticket: A city builds 500 homes and a shopping center on farmland at its edge. Name one likely effect on the city, one on a nearby town, and one on the environment. Explain the cause of each.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a printed city-edge map; have them place sticky-note homes and roads on farmland, then mark traffic routes and lost habitat.
Ask: Who might pay for a sewer line to new edge-of-town homes, and who benefits? Have students write two claims with reasons.
Sort cards labeled longer bus route, crowded town road, and paved wetland into city, nearby community, and environment columns; explain each choice.
Show a satellite image of the school area; students trace a development edge and predict where rainwater flows after paving.
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Related Standards
- SS24.WH.18
Describe the interrelationship between people and the environment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
- SS24.HG.11
Analyze how the economic and cultural activities of urban places shape surrounding regions.
- SS24.1.4
Describe ways occupational and recreational opportunities in the local community and state are affected by the physical environment.
- SS24.US1.17a
Summarize social, economic, and cultural consequences of urbanization for American society, including changes in living and working conditions, the emergence of...
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