One of my favorite weeks of school is learning about our community and different community helpers. Together we work on building our own community in our classroom, school, and town. Luckily for us we live in a wonderful community with great families and fantastic schools. During this week our focus was on text vs. world. We worked on building connections to our world outside of our classroom. To tie in the community helpers, we also focused on goods vs. services. This year we learned about different helpers each morning and reviewed this concept. By Friday my students understood the difference.
We enjoyed some fun stories, “Town Mouse Country Mouse” & “On the Town” but there aren’t a ton of stories geared towards first graders so I had to write a few.
Each day we read about a different community helper, two that provided goods and two that provided services. After we read about them, we wrote about them. This was our writing for the week. My students did a great job with their first informative writing pieces. You can see I modeled two sentences on the chart paper above. We also discussed rural, urban, and suburban communities. These were not required vocabulary words but I knew some of my first graders were ready for it so it was also part of our discussion.
Do your students love highlighters? Mine do! I’m starting to love them too. They are key to identifying important words and making connections. My “firsties” are mastering the art of reviewing text for key words! Here are a few of the fun activities we did together.
To end our week we had Career Day. They dressed up as their future career. It was so cute seeing them all dressed up. Together in small group we discussed our careers and decided if we were providing a good or a service. We also wrote about our career too!
At the end of the day, we shared what we were going to be and why. I saved these for their portfolios. It will be fun to look back some day and see these cute pictures.
As you can see, we were busy and had loads of fun. I always say if I’m bored they are bored. Happy Fall, I hope you could grab a few ideas from here!
