What does your little one want to be when they grow up? Little ones tend to pick our every day heroes. And teaching them about those men and women who serve our community is so important. There are so many thematic units that I love teaching, but I absolutely love our Community Helpers unit.
I love how flexible this unit is. You can teach it any time of year. I like to break it up and spread it out through our school year. There are so many national days that celebrate our community helpers. You can easily break this unit up on each of these days.
Create a Classroom Community
This is such a fun activity! Break your class into groups to create a classroom community. Grab brown butcher paper from the workroom. Draw streets to cover the paper leaving enough room for buildings and people.
Give each group a community helper and the building they work in. Let them color and create their own part of town!
Community Helpers Thematic Books
Fill your library with these community helpers thematic books. I like to place my favorites on the ledge of my dry erase board. It makes my heart happy when I see my students self select books that I recommend!
Many of these books are listed in this thematic unit. No need to plan activities for these books! I’ve included activities that pair perfectly with my favorites from this list.
Math Centers
All of my thematic unit include math and literacy centers. These centers are meant to be used as an extension or practice on skills that are already taught.
The math centers this unit covers are:
- Counting-one to one correspondence
- Patterns- recreating with pictures
- Shapes- sorting every day objects into shapes
Literacy Centers
Your little ones will love these literacy centers! No matter what time of year you pull this unit out, these centers are still age appropriate and should be completed independently with no guidance.
These centers include:
- Sight words- Read It, Make It, Write It
- Letter matching- capital and lowercase matching
- Ending sounds- find the matching ending sound to complete the puzzle
There is so much more this unit offers! You can check out more details below! But wait! You can grab this FREE Community Helpers interactive poem by clicking the download button below!