Community Helpers Guided Reading with a Purpose: Text to World

Do you teach your students about community helpers? This fun whole group reading unit is perfect to teach about text to world. It is also a great theme to incorporate social studies topics such as needs and wants, goods and services, and different parts of a community. These five books are the anchor books I have chosen for the week. I also share four other non-fiction digital readers that I have made on Boom Learning. 
Community Helpers Guided Reading with a Purpose: Text to World
We begin the week by focusing on the story “On the Town” by Casely. This story is so adorable. It is about a boy who gets an assignment to list places in his community. His mom decides to take him on a little trip around town and he gathers information on his community. It introduces many places in the community. 
Since we are just coming off of our text to self unit, we review that concept and share our own personal stories as you can see on the left sticky notes. Then we talk about world connections. I tell them to think of starting there statement by saying “In the world…” This really helped them understand how to make that connection. After working together on it, They went back to their seats and did their own for practice. 
We used the web above to write about our favorite place in the community.  You can see my mini example in the corner. I always write before my students write. They need modeling and examples. Her is an example of my student’s web and writing.
The rest of the week, we spend each day learning about a different community helper. I love to read “Officer Buckle and Gloria” by Rathman.  This story is so funny and it also introduces the students to some other things police officers do in the community. I loved these connections, especially the one that said, “In the world, dogs can do tricks.” After reading this book, and doing the text to world connections, we read the digital book on Boom. This book explains police officers in a small informational text. Then we completed a can, have and are chart. This year we made the dog Gloria. 

We also wrote about police officers.
We completed a text to self and text to world connection for this story. What child doesn’t have a doctor story to share? We again read the digital story about doctors and wrote about doctors.
Then we moved onto Firefighters. This is right around fire safety month so we discussed that too. Here are a few pictures from this day. There is also a picture of the digital reader. There is an arrow and a speaker button. I usually let a student lead the story and they push the voice and arrow. They love any opportunity to “be the teacher”
On the last day we read, “The Little Red Hen” by Galdone. You may be wondering how this story fits in with community helpers. Well I chose it because the hen does many of the duties that a farmer does. It also help show where things come from too. Oh, and… I LOVE this story. After reading this we made text to world connections and they were hilarious. I loved..”In the world, dogs are lazy”. “In the world, people do chores”.  By the end of the week, they were really grasping the concept. Of course we had to make the Little Red Hen. We also read our digital book, completed a can, have and are chart and wrote about farmers.  Farmers are so important to our community. I love to focus on the fact that they produce a good, instead of providing a service.  
 Here are a few examples

On the last day we dressed up as a community helper for career day. We shared what we want to be when we grow up and if our helper provides a good or a service.
Throughout the week we also completed these sorts. This is a great activity to work on for fast finishers or while other children finish up their work. 
You can do them more than one time too.
One more fun project we worked on during this week was a Noun Town. There are no worksheets for this activity we just learned about what a noun was by building the town. First we each built a building in our community (the place). Then we added the people. If you look closely you can see we cut out the pictures of us dressed up for career day.   We did the other two parts of a noun the following week we when learned about the farm. We added the animals and the things. I will share that in a blog post coming up soon. We just put everything together and it made our town. It is so cute out in the hallway.

If you liked this unit it is the fourth in my Guided Reading with a Purpose series. You can CLICK HERE! to check it out.

Megan

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Hello!

I’m Megan, a first grade teacher and a mother to 7 amazing children. I love to create and collaborate with teachers. When I’m not teaching, I love spending time with my family, baking and playing tennis.

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