Category Archives: Community Helpers
Community Helper Bags
I am SO excited to share these Community Helper Bags with you!! I’ve wanted to create them for awhile, but was just waiting for the ideas to come together in my mind so I could make them happen! I created 6 different bags and inside each one of them, I added items that would help my students experience a small part of that community helpers job. 
My students have had so much fun using these each day! They ask for a different bag each time and I love that they are interacting with each other as they explore.
A few days ago, some of my students found out how the Chef depends on the Grocer to get the food they need to prepare it! What a great connection. Its fun to watch the student who chooses the Mail Carrier bag go on their delivery rounds each day around the classroom! 
This is a closer look at each item that’s in each of the Community Helper Bags!
In this photo, you can see one of my students borrowed the fish from the Grocer bag so he could feed it to the kitten! 🙂
My students are THRILLED to be able to use these easy to make Community Helper Bags! You can read more about how I made them here! What other Community Helpers would you include?
Community Helpers
We are deep into our study of Community Helpers that ties into our IB unit “How We Organize Ourselves”. We invite many members of the community into our classroom to show us how they do their jobs. Last week, we had Domino’s Pizza Makers visit our classrooms. We had a GREAT time!
All we had to do was call our local Domino’s and they came right out and did this great demo for us! They also brought us pizza for lunch and gave us cups full of goodies to take home. 🙂
Vet’s Office via twinkl
Yesterday, I shared about twinkl with you! Who went and looked around? What awesome stuff did you find that you could use?
Today, I’m going to share how I used the resource pack from twinkl to transform my home living area into a Vet’s office. I laminated each item so it would last for the next month or so. 🙂
Every Vet’s office needs appointment cards!
I used these cards in the pocket chart that is in my vet’s office. The children can use them to help diagnose their patients. 🙂
These are the beautiful, real pictures that are included in the pack. I hung these around my vet’s office as they were appropriate. 
Love this sheet that the humans have to fill out about their pets. 🙂
I made two copies of this Pet Care word mat and placed them different places in the vet’s office. The children can use these as a guide to write sentences about their pets.
You can’t have a vet’s office without a way to keep track of your appointments!
This sign showing when the office is open will help my kiddos learn to tell time. 🙂
My kiddos love the OPEN and CLOSED signs. They like to be the one who flips the sign over to OPEN the store. 
Also included, are these great posters to include in your vet’s office area as advertisements for services that are offered there. 🙂 Love the variety!
And of course, worried human mommies and daddies will need a place to wait while their pet is being looked at!
Now a look at how this all looks in the vet’s office!
Inside the vet’s office. The patients are on the right, the vet’s exam table is in the middle and the stove holds important tools and bandages. 
Love these signs! 🙂
Pet wash area!! 🙂 
Vet’s bag of tools. 
This appointment sheet is laminated so that it can be used over and over again. 🙂
The kids voted and determined that we will have an exotic animal vet’s office, complete with polar bears, jaguars, horses, cows, beavers, and ducks! We looked through all the stuffed animals I had in the closet and these won out!
I’ll post more pictures of everything in action soon. 🙂
Kristen 🙂
More Bakery Pictures
Here are a few more pictures from our classroom bakery:
In another week…it will become a Veterinarian’s office. And after that…a Pizza place!
The Open/Closed signs–they love to flip these over when the Bakery is open/closed! 🙂
Our “Menu”
The whole class got excited about ordering from the Bakery and lined up at the walk-up window. The kiddos inside got clipboards and started taking orders. A couple of them started working the line and taking names and orders and two others stayed inside and filled the orders. It was ADORABLE and so CREATIVE!! 🙂
Filling the orders…
“A 1/2 dozen to go please!” 🙂
Kristen 🙂
A new day, a new grocery!
For the last two weeks, our home living area has been a Pizzeria, but for the next two weeks, we’ve transformed our house into a Grocery Store!
I purchased a pack from Kathleen @ Growing Kinders called “Fun at the Grocery Store”. That helped me get started and add some environmental print to our grocery store. Here are some pictures of our grocery. Any labels or signs that you see came from Kathleen’s pack. 🙂
You might also see my son in a few of the pictures. The cash register that we are using used to be his, and no matter how old he gets, he is still fascinated by it each time I bring it out. 🙂
I asked families in my class room to donate canned goods so we could pretend with them. After we are done with them, we will donate them to our Community Closet at our school to give to other children in our building who might need them.
Today was the first day they used the grocery and they got the biggest kick out of the coupons I laminated! I felt like a crazy lady laminating coupons, but they were expired ones and I thought it would be fun for them!
All day today, my kids made “dollars” when they were at our art center. I hadn’t added them yet, so they decided to create their own. Every single one of them was a $100 bill, so I hope they have lots of groceries to buy!
Kristen 🙂
Poindexter’s Pizzeria
Because we are learning about community helpers in this IB unit, I decided to turn my home living area into a Pizzeria for a few weeks (then a grocery store, and then a vet’s office). I traded all the “old boring stuff”–as the kids put it, out for some new pizzia-rific items:
Here is a picture of the outside of the Pizzeria. I changed out the curtains from blue with some lace trim to these red and white checked ones I sewed last night. I also made a table cloth for the table inside the pizza place. 🙂
Here is a look inside…everything you need to run a successful pizzeria!
Here you can see the menus I created. I got a new laminator from Purple Cows and I’ve been laminating like crazy! On the back there is a picture menu (with a few words) so the children can “order” a pizza and a small or large drink from each other. 
You can’t ever have too many old school phones for pizza orders! 🙂
A kitchen fit for a pizza artist!
The red and green box is a pizza set I got from Amazon.com. It’s a Melissa and Doug set. The pizza pieces velcro together and then toppings can be velcroed onto the top. There is a pretend wooden pizza cutter and serving tool that are also included. I actually got two of these, one from Amazon and one my husband picked up at Michael’s because I was worried it wouldn’t get here in time! 🙂
The kids loved playing Pizzeria today and it was fun to watch them try to interact with each other as a waiter/waitress!
Kristen 🙂
Happy New Year Freebie!
Happy New Year! I hope you all have a safe and happy new year! 2013 is already shaping up to be a great year for me! I’ll be presenting at the NSTA (National Science Teachers’ Association) conference in San Antonio this April and am anxiously awaiting news about my PAEMST award–to D.C or not to D.C! 🙂 I have to wait until May/June to find out, so cross your fingers. 🙂
I have a freebie for you! Thanks for 4 years of following my blog! I started in July of 2008!
In exchange for this freebie, please leave me a comment about what you’d like to see of more on my blog. 🙂 Do you like seeing what’s going on in my classroom, another swap, more TPT products…let me know so I can keep posting what you’d like to see! 😉
And now for the freebie…I was trying to come up with a simple Literacy Work Station that my kids could do that would tie into our community helper theme. This is a dice roll game, intended for use with the 4 1/2 inch clear pocket dice that you can use and change out the pictures. I’ve also included two recording sheets, one is great for readers or emergent readers and the other has the words and pictures on it for pre-readers.
Just click the picture below to go to my TPT store to download it…while you’re there, check out my sale!
Kristen 🙂
More Community Helpers
I wanted to create something that my kids could do at our Writer’s Work Station before they free write. I also needed it to tie into our Community Helper theme, so I made this set of sheets where they could practice reading and writing real and nonsense words, tied in the community helpers. Each sheet relates to a short vowel (a, e, i, o, u) and has a picture of a community helper, something they wear, or something that they help or use to do their job.
I’ve got a few more items to finish before my Winter Break is over, so be sure to click on the red star on my TPT store to follow me. Each time I add a new product, you will get an e-mail telling you I’ve added something new.
What would you like to see in my store? Leave me a comment and I’ll pick one to win my Community Helper Real/Nonsense word pack for free. 🙂
Happy New Year!
Kristen 🙂
Community Helpers
One last new thing today and then I’m going to bed! 🙂 When we return from Winter Break, we will begin a 6 week long unit about community helpers and government (talking about how we organize ourselves in different ways) as part of our upcoming IB unit. I decided to create some new community helper cards that can be used in at least 5 different ways:
Kristen's Kindergarten 