Communities

As we ended our citizenship unit in kindergarten, we transitioned smoothly into communities.  We begun by discussing what we know about neighborhoods.  We learned about the different kinds of neighborhoods, city, suburban, and rural.  We also learned about the different kinds of homes, house, apartment, farm, trailer.  In small groups shared about our own neighborhoods.  We continued to explore further about the people and families in a neighborhood and our neighbors.  The focus was to share how different kinds of people can make up each neighborhood.  We tied in some of our good citizen unit by thinking about how we should treat our neighbors regardless of their differences. 

The next step was to expand our thinking beyond a neighborhood to the community.  A community is the whole area around where you live. It’s not just the homes, but all of the buildings, and stores and places around them. We worked as a team at each table to brainstorm places in a community and the importance of each place.  Students took turns picking up images of the different places we brainstormed and shared with the group why they believed that place was important to the community. 


They did a great job explaining their thinking!  For example, "A police station is important because they help keep us safe, and they keep bad guys there!"  "A sports arena is important because people need to exercise to be healthy."  "A bank is important because we get money from it!"  "A school is important because we get to learn there!"  They did a fantastic job!


Then, each student picked an important place in our community to build a small model in our classroom.  We cut out and colored doors, windows, plants, ads, and signs for each location and glued them to paper bags.  They even created the roads and grass as well as each to connect the community!