There are so many people that help us in our community! From doctors and dentists, teachers and mail carriers, construction workers and police officers, and firefighter and nurses, the list goes on. These community helpers are so interesting for little ones to learn about and discover what they do to help our community, the equipment they need for their jobs, and the uniforms they wear. Here is the weekly overview:
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Community Helpers: Literacy Activities and Centers
Alphabet Road
Zoom! Spin the alphabet spinner and take a drive down Alphabet Road! There’s a building for every letter of the alphabet! We drove all around our town with our community helper vehicles following the letters of the alphabet. So much fun and you can even print out all of these buildings for your block center.
Ladder Letter Rescue
Get your team of firefighters up the alphabet ladder to put out the flames on these letters! Flip a card, climb the ladder, and learn your ABC’s along the way. Grab yours here!
Fingerprint Match ABC
While studying the different jobs that police officers do, we were really interested in mysteries. Of course, who isn’t? So I set up “The Case of the Missing Treats” in which we had to complete different activities to get our next clue. First clue: pink fingerprints were spotted on our table right after our donuts disappeared. (Gasp!) We completed an alphabet fingerprint match using our stamp set and submitted our own set of fingerprints to the police to get our next clue! These fingerprint matches and fingerprint cards are available at my TpT store and have different levels of letter matching so you can choose whichever fits your students best.
X-Ray Bone Alphabet
As part of our Doctor Office Dramatic Play, we built these alphabet x-rays using bones. We even placed the x-rays on our Crayola light-up tracing pad just like the doctors do! These are also sold separately from the Doctor Office Dramatic Play.
Stamp the Letters
Getting and opening the mail is always an exciting time for my little tot. Probably because it involves permission to rip paper :). While learning about mail carriers today, we stamped our envelopes with stamps that matched the beginning letter sounds. I just laminated them and added Velcro dots. To add in letter formation practice, we traced the letters on the front of the envelopes. You can even search for the letters in the personalized return labels! Then, deliver the mail in the matching color mailbox. Love, love, love this activity so much!
Community Helpers: Math Activities & Centers
Community Helpers: Spin & Graph
I dug out these magnetic spinners from my teaching supplies, and we have been having so much fun playing with them! I printed off the Community Helpers: Spinner & Graph, placed them on top of cookie sheets, and used magnetic push pins to keep track of our spins. While we went along, we talked about who had the most, who had the least, and who was equal. Never too early to start comparing numbers!
Put Out the Flames
I don’t know about you, but my child is obsessed with water (bath time, lake time, tea party with water, buckets with water, sensory tubs with water, puddles, etc.). So I thought learning about firefighters was the perfect opportunity to do an activity with water. I printed out flames with numbers 1-10, laminated them, covered them with a dollop of shaving cream, and then let the fun begin! My little one used a spray bottle to “put out the flames” and dabbed the flame on the recording sheet with the matching color. This is available at my TpT store with numbers 1-10 and 11-20 depending on what you are working on.
Measure the Footprints
The second part of “The Case of the Missing Treats” led us to mysterious footprints. We used counting cubes to measure them before receiving our next clue.
Dentist: Spin & Brush
Who can be the first with a clean tooth? This dentist game is a great math game. We started by drawing 10 spots on our tooth with a dry erase marker, then spun the spinner with our magnetic spinners. We either got to clean off spots or add extra dirty spots. Along the way, we stopped to count how many dirty spots we had left. One of our favorite activities this week because we got to use real toothbrushes!
Mail Carrier: Stuff the Envelopes
We have almost mastered number identification and then we will be able to play Uno for real! But for now, we just used our Uno cards for number matching with the envelopes. I took one of each colored number out of the deck, placed them in the mailbox, and had my little one stuff the envelopes and mail them off!
Community Helpers: Sensory Bins / Dramatic Play
Community Helpers Clothesline Sensory Bin
Oh no! Our clothes fell into the grass! Quick! Hang them back on the line so they can dry! Using our Dress-Up Julia clothes, which include so many community helpers’ uniforms, we hung the clothes on the line. Then, we created outfits for Julia and talked about what my little one wants to be when she grow up (She said she wants to turn back into a baby. Don’t we all?) Also available as Dress-Up Joey.
Firefighter Water Sensory Bin
Today, we pretended to be firefighters and spray out the flames on the with this water sensory bin filled with applesauce lids. We even added in some color with our Bath Fizz Tablets! Again, my little one loves anything to do with water, so this was a great way to get some fine motor skills in with the droppers.
Police Puzzles: Donuts & Sprinkles Sensory Bin
As the last part of “The Case of the Missing Treats,” we dug around our donuts and sprinkles sensory bin to find police puzzle pieces. My little one had to put them together to get the final clue to the mystery: a burp coming from the closet! Guess we figured out who took our donuts!
Doctor Office Dramatic Play
To this day, playing doctor office is one of our all time favorite things to do! We are constantly giving each other check-ups using this laminated patient form. Love that literacy skills are incorporated by having students sign in, taking the eye test (with all 26 letters of the alphabet), and looking at the x-ray alphabet! So much learning wrapped into play!
Mailbox Sort
We used our envelopes from the Alphabet Envelopes and sorted them by matching the color of the envelope to the colors on the mailbox. This was a great activity to pretend like we were mail carriers, delivering the mail into all of the mailbox slots. Updated: I added mailbox printouts to make this easier to set up!
This unit began to open my tot’s eyes to the big world around her by showing her how different members of our community help us. It also gave her a better picture at what a job is and why it’s important to for these people to go to work each day. Hope you enjoy these community helper activities! You can grab the entire unit from my TpT store at a discounted price!
