Communities Unit

Hi everyone! The rain has finally arrived here in Portland, Oregon. Usually we have months and months of rain, starting in October and pretty much sticking around through June. But this year, October has been beautiful! We've been so spoiled and now on to the rain. It's not stopping us though. We still went to a Harvest Fest outside yesterday in the  rain with our little guys. That's what raincoats are for, right?

Anyway....on to the stuff you really want to read about! We are learning about communities right now. First, we defined the word community. I don't have a picture of this, but basically, it was just a chart with the definition (I left some letters out so they had to help me fill it in). Then after some discussion, I had them each draw something they might find in a community and we added it to our anchor chart. 

Then, we talked about the different types of communities. The very familiar City Mouse and Country Mouse is the perfect book to read. (That book doesn't include the suburbs, so I talked about that afterward.) Then we made these flip books to show urban, rural, and suburban. They drew pictures on the outside:

then wrote about what they might see in each community on the inside.

We talked about the benefits of living in each type of community. The book City Mouse and County Mouse really helps with this. Then each student chose one type of community that they would prefer to live in and we wrote about it. I think I'll make this into a class book because they turned out super cute!

Next we talked about community helpers. We discussed the words citizen, jobs, service, and responsibility to start off. The overall goal of the lesson was to help them see that in a community, citizens have a responsibility to do their part to make the community run smoothly. Every job is important and provides some sort of service. There are so many cute units out there about community helpers. I made this little sheet to make that connection between a community helper (and their job) and the service that they provide to a community. 

I have more to share next week from my community unit so come back and see. 

You can check out this unit here.