Community Helpers

Last year, I did a two-week long unit on community helpers, and we spotlighted a certain community helper each day, learning about them and doing a fun craft.

This year, the way it worked out, I only had one week for my community helpers unit. On top of that, it was Labor Day week, so it was only four days. I chose to take two days to talk about communities first, before delving into community helpers. It was actually a bit easier, I thought, to just teach about many community helpers over few days than teaching one each day.

We started out the week by reading Me on the Map. We spent time that day looking at Google Earth, starting at the world and zooming in farther and farther until we could see specific sites in St. Louis. We did a circle craft (I didn't take pictures!) in which they colored the world, the country, the state, the city, and their house. The country and state, I printed out the outline maps and just had them color them in.

The next day, we talked about places in our community. We read Places in my Neighborhood and made a big list of all kinds of places that we think are important to have in a community - fire station, police station, school, church, stores, pool, hospital, things like that. Then, we read Map My Neighborhood in preparation to make our own community maps!

This community map project was one my mom used to do with her class all the time. I paired kids up in our first real "group project." I was a little hesitant to do that so early in the year, but I thought that having them paired up might spark more meaningful decisions about what they need in their community and where they should put it. Unfortunately, I didn't see too much of that throughout the project, but they at least all worked with their partners without arguing or fighting, so that's a success, right?

All I did was to take 2 pieces of 12"x18" paper for each group and tape them together. I also cut some long black strips for roads. Besides that, I just set out markers and our scrap paper basket and let them go at it once I explained it!

We spent two days of art time working on these, and you can even see that each group got farther along than the other. One group finished with enough time to get everything labeled and give their town a name. Another group got most things labeled. My third group never even got to labeling, But hey, that's life, and they still all look pretty cool, I thought. with lots of learning going into them!

One last thing about my community helpers unit is the poem I use. We do a weekly poem related to our science/social studies theme. Most weeks, we will make art to go with it and put into their Poetry Book. We sing or say the poem each morning as part of our phonics routine.

This unit's poem goes like this:

When I grow up, I want to be
the very best _____________ that I can be.
I'll do my job so carefully
to be the best me that I can be!

In the blank, we put the name of a community helper or job. For this poem, I have a pocket chart version that we use during phonics, and that students can go use during center time as well. It's a fun way for them to learn print concepts and interact with the poem. I just wrote the poem out on sentence strips, cut up the words, and then wrote a number of community helpers on sentence strips, with accompanying pictures to help the students. They love doing that during center time!




For our art to go with this poem, the kids draw a self portrait of themselves as a grown-up in the job that they want. It takes a lot of time and patience, but I always put out lots of books so the students can look at what they might wear in that job, what kind of setting they would be in, and what kind of tools they might use. Both years, the result has actually been really good! Unfortunately, I don't have pictures to share of that artwork.

God's blessings and happy teaching!
Mikaela

The Little Red Hen Unit

Did anyone else come out of their first year of teaching with a bunch of goals and aspirations? I mean, that's what it is to be a teacher, right? One of my (many) goals was to improve literature instruction. 

I wanted to be able to incorporate not just reading a book, but also looking at story elements, develop re-telling skills, learning vocabulary words, and allowing the students to connect the story to themselves, others stories, and the world. Not just every once in a while, but for every story, every week. I also wanted to expose my students to all kinds of good, classic literature for their age level, with folk tales and fairy tales and new, more modern stories mixed in. I wanted to intentionally reinforce all these skills and introduce meaningful texts, and not let them get lost in the "not enough time" dilemma or to allow bad curriculum to hold me back. 

So over the summer I did a lot of research and checked a lot of books out of the library and planned out the book that we would be reading each week. The problem I ran into was wanting to keep my literature at least loosely connected to our social studies/science theme for the week, but also having a good range of literature for the students to be exposed to. But hey, I made it work, and last week, we had our first traditional literature unit of the year - The Little Red Hen, with our social studies unit being community and community helpers. 

In order to help with the re-telling skill of this story, I made some little stick puppets of the characters. I just found some free printables of the story online, colored them, laminated them, and then taped them onto craft sticks. After using them to retell the story during the lesson, I also put them out at a center for a few days. The kids loved going to that center and saying "Not I!" and "Then I'll do it myself!" over and over. 

On Friday, my plan is to always do an activity to connect the story to the students' lives or allow them to get deeper into the story. So we took some time to bake bread! Rather than dealing with yeast and sticky dough, I chose for us to make cornbread, and we made it in muffin tins so they were easy to serve! Pretty much, I had the ingredients pre-measured and the students all got to help put the ingredients into the bowl and stir. They were SO excited to eat them! They each got one at snack and one to take home, and surprisingly, they all ate them. I guess I don't have any picky eaters this year. If you could see their excited little faces in these photos, it would melt your heart. It was a lot of work but definitely worth it! 

God's blessings and happy teaching!

Mikaela

Environmental Print Activities

Just finished day #12 of school and boy am I wiped! It turns out, a class of six is harder than it seems. Sure, prepping art projects and making copies and putting wet paint projects on the drying rack and stuffing folders doesn't take as long as it would for a class of 12 or 20, but six is its own challenge. Right now, I'm dealing with the goofiness and silliness and trying to teach them when it is appropriate to be that way. They're still sleeping most afternoons during rest time. Can I make a little confession? Today, I let them keep sleeping. It was just a rough day. They needed it, I needed it. The last hour of school was so much better for it. 

Something I didn't do last year that I really wish I had was working with environmental print. Last year, as a new teacher, I was reliant on the curriculum, which included no mention of environmental print activities. Throughout the year, I came across something on Pinterest that sparked a memory of seeing this done in classrooms before...possibly my mom when she was a teacher? I don't know. BUT wherever it came from, I miraculously remembered to include it in my lesson planning for the first weeks of school. 

I explored a bunch of different options, and I finally settled on a few activities over a span of several days. On Monday, I introduced the concept of environmental print. I asked them to raise their hands if they knew how to read. None of them raised their hands. I pulled out some of the labels and logos I had printed out and asked them to read them. Guess what? After that, when I asked them if they could read, they all raised their hands! I so wish I had done this last year, I felt like I had a few readers who didn't use their full potential because they just didn't have confidence that they could read. 

After that little introduction, we played this FREE "I Have, Who Has?" game of environmental print from Gluesticks 'N Giggles. This is such a great game, and so catchy for my little ones! It's especially helpful for my little English Learners, practicing those phrases in the correct pronouns and verb tenses.

Then, we created an "I Can Read!" book. I laid out all the labels and logos out on a table and let each child come and pick five. They then took them back to their tables and glued them into their books. These books each have the sentence "____________ can read _____________", also allowing for extra name practice. After they finished gluing, I had them take the books home for a few days to practice reading them with their parents, and I will put them in their book boxes so they have something simple to read. 

By the way, DON'T spend time printing out your own labels or logos or signs!! Just do a quick search on TPT or Pinterest -- many people have made very wide-encompassing documents you can download for free! I made one for myself with specific movies and tv shows that I know the kids enjoy, as well as some St. Louis specific logos (I don't know a single St. Louis resident who doesn't recognize the Cardinals logo!). 

In addition to small personal books for the kids to read, I also wanted to make a larger scale project for the kids to reference. As much as I love those environmental print word walls, my walls are already taken up to the max. So I decided to make a "word wall" and put it into a binder to keep in the writing center. Rather than spending an hour sorting and gluing all the letters myself, I enlisted the kid's help and made it a learning experience. I left out all the leftover pieces from after the students made their individual books, and the next day, I asked them to sort them by the first letter onto the rug (we have a nice big rug with the whole alphabet around the edge!). Once they were all sorted, I checked them and removed duplicates, and then gave them the pages and had them start gluing! Within a few minutes, the book was ready to go! I never spend the time doing something my kids can do themselves and learn from it at the same time! 

So that's what we did for environmental print over the last few days, and it really was a lot of fun and really beneficial for the kids! What do you do for environmental print? Do you have any great ideas that have worked? 

God's blessings and happy teaching!

Mikaela