Community Helpers

This topic is one of my favorites to teach because its so easy for children to connect the learning with their immediate environment. We are surrounded with people who help us, be it doctors, nurses, teachers or police officers. And in some point or the other, children have had contact with these professionals. So teaching this unit is fairly easy and the opportunities for pretend play are also immense with this topic. In short, I always feel successful as a teacher when teaching this unit ;)

 I love incorporating literacy into any thematic unit, so I created a set of emergent readers which kids enjoy reading. It has simple repetitive sentences and basic sight words which makes them easy to read. 

I also get my kids to create their own books to take home. They can record the information they have learnt about each community helper and read it to their parents.

A good way to recap all the big words is through vocabulary cards. Just cut the pictures and words apart and put them in a pocket chart. Children look at the pictures and match the correct word. I find this extremely helpful, especially for children who struggle with remembering big words. You can also print two copies and play a memory game with these cards

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Another interesting activity is to do picture sorts. I normally keep this activity for assessing children's knowledge. I give them pictures of tools used by community helpers and they have to sort and stick the correct pictures for each community helper.

If you would like to get these activities, visit my TPT STORE.

I will be sharing more ideas that I do with this unit, so stay tuned!