Learning about community helpers and our communities is important and it’s fun! We celebrate community helpers with our Community Helpers Research Project and our social studies lesson plans! Students love learning about each community helper through read-alouds and graphic organizers! We draw community helpers, make snacks, and, of course, dress up!
Social Studies Lesson Plans: Community Helpers Research Project
For each community helper, we read a book or watch a video as our research. As we’re reading, we’re adding information to our graphic organizer!
Students can then use these graphic organizers to do their writing!
We also label community helpers as a way to build vocabulary! The vocabulary lessons are explicit instructions to learn what the words mean and how they are used by each community helper!
Community Helpers: Directed Drawings
In our class, we love directed drawings! For each community helper, we do a directed drawing! After we draw our picture, the students were free to color their drawings.
Below are the sketches and steps I created/used when doing our directed drawings. I do my modeling on chart paper so the drawings are bigger. When we finish drawing, students outline the drawing with a black crayon first. Then they color. They can choose to do boys or girls and any colors they chose.
Social Studies Lesson Plans: Community Helpers Books
CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE OUR BOOK LIST ON AMAZON!
Community Helpers Snacks
Each Friday in our class is Foodie Fun Friday. We make snacks tied to our unit or theme for the week. Check out these community helper snacks!
The fire truck snack is a graham cracker, red icing, a red M & M, black licorice, and mini Oreos for the wheels. The window is Corn Chex.
This construction worker snack is so easy! You use pretzel sticks and cheese cubes to make a hammer and nails! The truck is made with sugar wafers and Rolos!
And since we’re learning about nurses and doctors, we have to make a Band-Aid snack! We use graham crackers, white icing, and red icing to make a band-aid! This one is always so fun for the kids to eat!
Social Studies Lesson Plans: Communities
As part of our social studies curriculum, we also learn about our communities. This is a challenging topic for kids so we created our My Community Research Project to make it easier for kids to understand what their community is and how they help their communities.
We learn about different types of communities, what we can find in our communities, and how we can be good citizens!
Dress Up!
Of course, this unit has to include a dress-up day and visits from our local community helpers!
Community Helpers Freebies!
For more on research projects, check out this post:
