Slide outline for Lesson 3.14, one day. Thirteen slides. Every family on every slide is fictional or from a show or a book. No student is asked to describe their own family aloud. Each structure on slides 5 and 6 carries a stick figure arrangement as its icon, the same one printed on Handout 3.14 Part 2.
Types of Families and How Families Change
- Lesson 3.14: Families and Caring for Others
- Unit 3: Growing Up, Getting Along
- Do now: think of families from shows, movies, books, or games. Not real people you know
- List as many different kinds of families as you can. Two minutes. Kinds, not names
Teacher notes
Hand vote on how many kinds each student listed: 1 to 2, 3 to 4, 5 or more. Collect the kinds on the board without judging any of them. [Sal: if the last three pairs from Lesson 3.13 still owe a performance, run them before this do now, five minutes.]
By the end of today
- You will have at least nine kinds on your list
- And you will be able to prove that every one of them is a family
- We start with what a family does, not what it looks like
Teacher notes
Image: nine small groups of stick figures in different arrangements, all the same size on the page.
The four jobs every family does
- Care: keeps you safe and fed
- Teach: rules, language, how to treat people
- Provide: a home, food, clothes, money
- Belong: you are theirs and they are yours
- A family is defined by what it does, not by who is in it
Teacher notes
Image: four boxes in a row with a small icon in each: a bandage, an open book, a house, and two linked rings.
Students copy the four jobs and write one example of each from a show, a book, or a game on Part 1. Never cut this slide; it is the reason every structure counts.
Relationship, and "the basic unit of society"
- A relationship is a connection between people with expectations on both sides
- A family is a set of relationships with the four jobs attached
- The state calls the family the basic unit of society
- Society is built from families the way a wall is built from bricks
- If families do the four jobs, schools, towns, and workplaces work better
Teacher notes
Image: a wall of bricks, each brick holding a small group of figures.
Ask what a town would look like if no family did the "teach" job. Take one answer.
Structures, part 1
- Nuclear: two parents and their children
- Single parent: one parent and their children
- Blended: two families joined, with step-parents and step-siblings
- Extended: grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins in the home or close by and part of daily life
Teacher notes
Image: four stick figure arrangements, one per structure, drawn the same size and weight.
Give a fictional example for each as you go. Students fill the example column on the chart. Say the line after every row: every one of these is a family, because every one of them does the four jobs.
Structures, part 2
- Adoptive: a child legally joined to a family that is not their birth family
- Foster: a family caring for a child placed with them for a time by the state
- Grandparents raising grandchildren: grandparents who are the daily caregivers
- Guardian: an adult legally responsible for a child who is not a parent
- Others: two moms or two dads; a deployed parent; a family split between two countries; a close friend who is "like an aunt"
Teacher notes
Image: five more stick figure arrangements, same size and weight as slide 5.
Students circle any structure they had not thought of during the do now. If the word "normal" comes up, the answer is on the next slide: normal is any family doing the four jobs. A student who says "my family is not on the chart" gets "then the chart is missing a row; tell me the four jobs and it goes on."
Scenario match
- Twelve scenarios on the handout. Write the structure each one shows
- Some fit two structures. Write both
- Every name on the page is made up
- Work in pairs. One writer is fine
Teacher notes
Grade 6 and IEP/504 pairs do scenarios 1 to 8, or six of twelve. Grade 8 pairs take 9 to 12. Clipboard: nine of twelve matched sensibly. A pair that writes "extended" for every scenario with a grandparent gets the question "is the grandparent part of daily life, or visiting?"
Compare two structures
- Pick any two from the chart
- One way they are alike
- One way they are different
- One role that might differ: who cooks, who signs the permission slip, who you go to when you are sick
- 9 minutes for the match and the compare together
Teacher notes
"They are different" is not a difference. Push for the role line; it is the one that makes the compare real. Grade 6 does one likeness and one difference only.
The family life cycle is a loop
- Forming: two people or one person decide to make a home
- Growing: a child comes, by birth, adoption, or fostering
- School years, then teen years: rules change as children get independent
- Launching: a young adult leaves
- Later years: a couple or a single adult again, often grandparents
Teacher notes
Image: the six stages drawn around a circle with arrows going one way, and one arrow from later years back to growing.
A loop, not a ladder. A family can be at two stages at once, a teen and a toddler in the same home. Grade 8 writes two sentences on why it is a loop.
Transitions can happen at any stage
- A move
- A new sibling
- A job change or a job lost
- A divorce or a separation
- A death
- A new country
- A transition changes the shape. It does not un-family the family
Teacher notes
Image: a family group of figures with a dotted arrow moving one figure to a different position in the group, the group still drawn as one unit.
Pick one scenario, pick one transition
- Which scenario? Which transition?
- What changes?
- What stays the same?
- Write both lines on Part 5
Teacher notes
Take three answers. A strong one: scenario 6 and a death. What changes is who walks Omar to school, and the family is grieving. What stays the same is that the parents and the aunt still do the four jobs and Omar still belongs.
No one structure is better
- What matters is whether the four jobs get done
- Every structure on the chart can do them
- Somebody says a nuclear family is the "normal" one. Using two scenarios from the handout, what do you say back?
- Other questions: is a family that does three jobs well and struggles with one still a family? What is the difference between adoptive and foster?
Teacher notes
Take one example that proves the claim before you move to the exit card. Normal is any family doing the four jobs. Say it in those words.
Exit card and tomorrow
- On the index card: 3 structures from memory
- 2 of the four jobs every family does
- 1 sentence: "No one family structure is better than another because ___" with an example from a scenario, not a real family
- Tomorrow: who does what at home, and what a fair share actually looks like
Teacher notes
Three students read their "1." Sort into "got it" (the sentence uses the four jobs or a scenario) and "needs more." Tell the counselor this lesson ran; a student in a transition may want to talk afterward.