Community Helpers:Our House/Our Community

For  Preschool Homeschool Study, we did doing a year long Unit Study of Community Helpers. It consisted of several mini-unit studies on the community helpers that the boys and I decide who we want to study. We started studying our community by focusing on our own house & neighborhood.


BOOKS

•  This is My Town: Little Critters (I Can Read: My First) by Mercer Mayer
• Helpers in My Community
• Whose Hands Are These?: A Community Helper Guessing Book (Millbrook Picture Books)

Read these books and ask your children which helpers they want to learn more about! I was surprised that my kids were much more interested in learning about garbage  collectors than chefs. You can of course learn about whatever helper you as a teacher would like, but their interest will guide how in depth you go, and how long your study will be.  We spent almost  month on garbage trucks & fire fighters, because my boys could not get enough of them.


ACTIVITIES

Stick House

You need to start with your home before branching out o the community.  Preschoolers are egocentric, and they must start from the familiar to learn. Since my boys were not very into drawing at this time, so I had them collect the tons of tiny sticks in our front yard and used them to construct our house. This activity helped with observation skills and shape identification.Shape House 

Materials:

• foam sheets (cut into different shapes)

We also used some felt shapes to build our house inside. This was a fun way to explore shapes and patterning. You can see how they made the steps rectangles and the roof triangle.

Painting our Community
Materials:

• Mural paper
• green washable paint
• Children's Foam Rollers
• black construction  paper for roads

My boys had fun painting a giant piece of mural paper green. This is a week long project, with the drying time. This map will be added to through out study, adding fire stations and police stations after field trips. We ended up adding two more large green pieces to fit everything!  Be ok with the fact that it will not be geographically accurate
Our House in our community 

My kids don't like to draw yet, so they dictated to me what they wanted to include and I drew the items. The  boys practiced scissor skills by cutting them out. Be sure to have a discussion about this because your children may surprise you at how observant they are! I planned on just drawing our house, but the boys insisted we put our trees, driveway, garage, cars, and sidewalk on the map. I had to draw the line somewhere when they wanted to put the tiny flowerpots on our front porch on the map. We ended up adding the park down the street from us because it was so important to the boys!

May contain affiliate links.  No extra costs to you, I just receive a small percentage of your purchase.