Over the last few weeks, we have started our unit about what makes Pennsylvania a unique state, and we started by talking about our state's government. We learned the interesting fact that our state government was the model for the United State government and other states' governments. Since we learned about the federal government last year in third grade, that made things pretty easy for us!
One thing we talked about was the concept of checks and balances. All of the branches of our government have equal power because they each have special jobs to keep the others from getting too much power. Unfortunately, we've also talked about how people don't work together, and then we have problems like our current budget situation here in PA.
To really highlight how the branches of government have to work together, we did an activity where three friends had to balance a marble on a triangular piece of paper. It doesn't sound hard, but we very quickly learned that it was REALLY challenging. There were marbles bouncing all over the room! Eventually we figured out that we had to work together and hold the paper equally to get the marble to balance. It took a while, but we it really helped us understand how the branches of government have to work together.
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Is this how we're supposed to do it?
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| I think we've got it! |
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| Dropping the marble to see what happens |
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| Uh oh! Watch out! |
