Mapping Our Community

Hi All,
We are moving along in our "How We Organize Ourselves" unit and we had a GREAT week.  After learning about all the community helpers, the students came up with all the different places that are important in the community.  The kids then chose the building they would like to make.  They spent lots of time adding details and making their pictures look good so that we could tell what they were on our map.

Then, as a class, we sat down and discussed where each building should go on the map.  The kids debated which building were most important, and where they should be placed.  For instance, at first we had the community pool in the middle of the map.  Soon, the kids decided that the post office and police station were more important and should be in the middle.  They also chose to separate the two fire stations so that they could help people on different sides of the community.  Later, we created roads, railroad tracks, trees and a lake.  The kids chose different symbols to represent these different features on the map.

At this point, one little girl asked "What are maps even used for?"  This was just so exciting!  We added that question to the Wonder Wall, and began searching for the answer.

Finally, we introduced the compass rose and began asking the students to identify where things were.  The kids did a great job and they were so engaged because it was something they had created!

Check out these pictures of the process!

Asking Questions

This past week, we had two community helper visits - one from a local police officer and another from a firefighter. Before each visit, the students came up with a ton of questions to learn more about them. We introduced the “Wonder Wall” during these lessons by writing the students’ questions on sticky notes and adding them to the speech bubbles above their heads.

 This was the first time we had generated questions as a class, and were super impressed with the kids’ inquiries! During inquiry, students are encouraged to generate questions to drive their own learning, so these activities supported our IB unit perfectly! We plan to do several more asking questions lessons before transitioning to having the students add questions about anything they wonder about, at any time, to the “Wonder Wall.”

Unit #2 Begins...

We are beginning our next unit of study! One down… 5 more to go!  Our unit, “How We Organize Ourselves” focuses on community helpers.  We will be discussing their roles, their location in the community, and how cooperation amongst people in a community makes a safe and comfortable place to live.  We will even check out community helpers around the world.  We will investigate the similarities and differences of the different countries’ community helpers with ours here in the United States.

This first week we are just focusing on community helpers, in general.  We are reading nonfiction books that highlight different jobs in our community.  We have created a community helper flipchart with slides for brainstorming, graphing, and identifying community helpers and their roles, to help spice up our lessons! And best of all, we created community helper bingo cards so our students can learn and have fun at the same time!  You can check out the flipchart and the bingo cards on TPT, by clicking the pictures below!

We will continue adding all the different fun, inquiry based, activities in this unit, as we go.  Check back in for more ideas!