Miss Bindergarten and Community Helpers

Last week we read one of our reading series books (SF), Miss Bindergarten Takes a Field Trip with Kindergarten.  The children were able to make some great text-to-text connections since we had read Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten back in August.  I was able to introduce the word schema and the children made some great predictions about the text based on their schema. 

I decided to use the theme of Miss Bindergarten to incorporate some social studies.  We took a couple of days and learned about what community helpers are and where they work/what their job is.  We also made a community map to learn about nouns.  These ideas came from April Larremore's blog over at Chalk Talk.

We made a circle map to brainstorm some things we wanted to be when we grow up.

 

We made bridge maps and did some shared writing to learn about community helpers and the jobs they do.  The children worked in pairs for this - we brainstormed a list of community helpers and their jobs.  They drew the person and the place where they work.  (sorry - for some reason, I can't get these to rotate! Sometimes blogger is stubborn!)

We also learned about nouns.  We brainstormed and made a list of all the things that we see when we are out in our community.  Each child drew some sort of building (house, restaurant, school, etc.) The next day, they drew the smaller things (nouns!) to add the details to the mural.  We added labels on the very last day! So, in total it took us about 3 days about 15 minutes each day.  There was a bit of prep work on my part - typing the labels and cutting things out for them, but they went away understanding what a noun is!  

Next up....pumpkins! Stay tuned....