Community Helpers In Town Language Arts English Language Essay

The unit will focus on the community helpers in our town. I chose this unit because it is important for children to know who is responsible for the many jobs that occur for a community to function. I chose to teach this unit towards the end of the school year once the students have developed their reading and writing skills because many of the activities associated with the unit require the students to have basic reading and writing skills. The helpers that I decided to discuss were the police officer, firefighter, dentist, doctor, farmer, and builder because these community helpers play a prevalent part in the students’ community. Each day that a new community helper is introduced there will be a guest speaker coming into the room to share about their job, talk about their uniforms, and answer student questions.

Students will be keeping a community helper journal that they will write in to discuss what they learned from the guest speaker, activities, or books. Students will also be expected to write about what they saw or learned on their field trips. There will be 2 fieldtrips that will occur during this unit. The first field trip is to the local farm where the students will get to talk with the farmer, see him do some of his chores, interact with different farm animals, and ask any questions. The second field trip will occur at the end of the unit. The entire class will take a field trip throughout the town looking at buildings of where different community workers work to tie up the unit. Throughout the unit students will be responsible for creating appropriate questions to ask each guest speaker, participate in role playing/dramatic play activities, share with the class their thoughts and ideas, and keep a community helper journal. Students will also make crafts like hats of the community workers or tools they use to help motivate the students into learning more about our community helpers.

In order to improve their vocabulary students will be able to describe what a community helper is and why they are important to our community in their journal. This will be assessed through the use of a rubric to determine the extent to which the child’s description matches the helper in our community.

In order to improve their vocabulary students will be able to recognize and describe buildings of community helpers and community helpers in their town. This will be assessed through their presentation on their town building by using a rubric to determine appropriateness of the content.

Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation in order to determine what career they would like to pursue when they are older (NYS English Language Arts #2)

Students will determine what they want to be when they grow up and write a few short sentences to describe their career. This will be assessed through a rubric to examine appropriateness of the content.

Students will be able to determine why community helpers are important and what would happen if we did not have certain community helpers. This will be assessed through class participation points.

The students will use age appropriate sentence structure and speaking skills in order to read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction (NYS English Language Arts #4).

In order to improve students sentence structure the students will generate appropriate questions to ask our community helper guest speakers. This will be assessed through the use of a rubric to determine that the question represents what the student wants to ask.

In order to improve students’ sentence structure students will be required to keep a community helper journal and write at least 2 basic sentences about the worker. This will be assessed through the use of a rubric to determine appropriateness of the content.

In order to improve the students’ speaking skills the students will ask our guest speaker their question. This will be assessed by simple checkmark system either the student asked or did not ask the question.

Essential Knowledge:

After completion of the community helpers literary unit students will be able to name a variety of community helpers in their town and describe what each helper is responsible for and why they are an important part of our community.

Students should be able to formulate topic appropriate questions about a subject.

Students should be able to act out the roles and duties of different community workers

Students should be able to formulate sentences using basic sentence structure and grammar.

Students should be able to present their questions, ideas, and information to the group using appropriate speaking skills.

Relationship to the standards:

The three standards that I chose to use were the standards that focused on information and understanding, social interaction, and literary response and expression. The information and understanding standards will be met through teaching the students new vocabulary about community helpers and having the students explore the new vocabulary terms and demonstrate understanding of each of the community helpers. The standard for social interaction will be met by having the students engage in appropriate role-playing situations by acting as community helpers. Also, this goal will be met by having the students create questions and present their questions to the community helper guest speakers that visit our classroom.

The standard about literary responses and expression will be met because children will be read a story each day to go along with the community helper the class will be learning about that day and the students will be required to create a question to ask the guest speaker based on the topic of the book. Also, this goal will be met by having the students express what they would like to be when they grow up based upon the information discussed throughout the unit.