Canada
Grade 1 looked at the community. Grade 2 zooms out to the whole country — its physical regions, its leaders, its heritages, and the trade and transport that connect places too far apart to walk between.
What Alberta asks for by the end of Grade 2
The subject: Social studies
- Canada's physical regions and natural resources.
- Leaders in Canada, including the prime minister and the premiers.
- Traditions and heritages across Canada, including those of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, francophones and diverse communities.
- How trade and transportation support communities.
- Competencies for democratic discussion and decision making.
The last one is a skill rather than a topic: listening to a different view, disagreeing without insulting, and reaching a decision a group can live with. It comes back in every grade after this and eventually becomes Social 30-1.
The words, first
These are the terms a teacher will use at a parent interview, defined before anything below uses them.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Physical region | A large area sharing landforms, climate and plants. Alberta spans three of Canada's eight. |
| Natural resource | Something useful that comes from the land or water: timber, oil, fish, fresh water, farmland. |
| Renewable / non-renewable | Whether it can be replaced within a human lifetime. Trees and fish can be; oil and coal cannot. |
| Prime minister | The leader of Canada's federal government. |
| Premier | The leader of a provincial or territorial government. Alberta has a premier; Canada has a prime minister. |
| Heritage | What a group has received from those before them — language, stories, skills, celebrations. |
| Trade | Exchanging goods or services. Between communities it means each can do what it does best. |
| Transportation | How people and goods move. In a country this size it is the thing that makes trade possible at all. |
| Democratic discussion | Talking through a decision so everyone is heard and the group can settle it. Requires listening, not only speaking. |
Canada's physical regions
- Pacific Maritime
- Cordillera
- Prairies
- Boreal Plains
- Canadian Shield
- Great Lakes
- Atlantic Maritime
- Arctic
What to do at home
- Find your region on a map — Alberta sits across the Cordillera, the Prairies and the Boreal Plains. Which one is out of the window?
- Follow something to where it came from — The label on the fruit, the flour, the fuel. Trade and transportation become visible in a grocery bag.
- Name the two leaders — The prime minister and the premier of Alberta. Which one runs which is the confusion worth clearing up early.
- Tell a heritage story — Something a grandparent did differently, a word from another language, a dish that comes from somewhere.
- Disagree properly, once — Let a small family decision be discussed and decided. The outcome is the process, not the answer.
- Ask how it got here — Truck, train, ship or plane. Canada is enormous and that is the whole reason transportation is an outcome.
Sheets you can print for this
- Canada's regions — eight, west to east
- Will it run out? — renewable and non-renewable
- Who leads what? — prime minister and premier
- How did it get here? — trade and transportation
The expectations above are paraphrased from Alberta Education's New K–6 curriculum fact sheets, which publish a snapshot of each grade rather than the complete program of studies. Alberta's full programs are at alberta.ca/curriculum.