Wednesday group - building a community

Building a community of care one question at a time

Close your eyes and imagine that you are walking on this bridge. What do you see ahead of you? What is behind you?

The children closed their eyes and they said that they saw a snake, a building and a school at the end of the bridge. From that idea we started building a community. I modeled the process by asking them one question at a time.

e.g Where do you live? After the answer, followed the second question:  Do you have a pet? 

Next Wednesday, the children will receive some cards and they will ask the other children one question at a time and build a community by following their answers.

On the board, there will be some profile words and the children will find the ones that describe the community that they are building.

Tuesday group - Ice cream seller

Tuesday’s group is exploring Olivia’s inquiry of making ice cream and selling it to the children using an ice cream truck. We all made a list of what we need:

·      To play some instruments and decide which sound we will choose to notify the children that the ice cream truck is in our community.

·      To build an ice cream truck

·      To go to the store to buy ingredients

The children enjoyed going for a walk all the way to the store and Olivia said that you have to be knowledgeable when you choose the ingredients. They all discussed as a group about what flavour of ice cream they should buy in order to satisfy their customers.

Monday Group - Firefighters

Monday group is interested in what it means to be a firefighter, a teacher, a cleaner, a construction worker and a vet. Today we explored being firefighters. We read the stories "Fire fighters" by Norma Simon and "Fire engines" by Anne Rockwell and the children identified two profile words. Isaak said that the fire fighters are knowledgeable about their job. It is very important to know what they need to do, because a fire can happen any time and they need to be ready to go. The children also observed from the pictures that the fire fighters are very organized – Natalya said that it is important to be organized because they are always in a hurry when something happens. Not having their stuff in a known place would give the fire fighters a hard time and they might not be on time to save the people.

Aston said that the fire fighters are very CARING. They’ve got a very important job in our community saving lives and buildings.

The children came up with a list of what we need to re-enact this job.

 The list included: fire bell, jacket, boots, hat, rain pants, fire truck, masks, hoses, ladder, pretend house on fire, fire department.

We will change the drama area into a fire department and we welcome all the parents and the children to come to our station and inquire about our responsibilities. Today we worked on getting our materials ready and next Monday we will re-enact a scene.

Building together

How We Organize Ourselves
Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community
Line of Inquiry: The jobs people do in our community support its development
Teacher questions: What is community? 
           What are some jobs done in the community and how do they make a difference.

The children have an understanding that there are jobs in the community such as construction workers, gardeners, fire fighters, teachers, cleaning jobs, veterinarian, doctors, police men, Ice cream man, Librarian, and Garbage collectors. Being inquirers, the children chose a job that is done in our community and each week we will pretend play it to see what it takes to do that job.

For IB profile word group time the children were split into 4 different groups.

Monday group – Natalya, Hao Hao, Isaak, Simon, Aston, Enxin, Aiden, Nicki

Tuesday group – Simone, Judy, Olivia, Rocco, Becky, Victoria, Byron, Peter

Wednesday group –  Adyson, Orin, Lucas, Yuha, Patterson,Leighton, Emilie, Pauline

Thursday group – Owen, Jack, Chloe, Serena, Julia, Cameron, Sarah, Kai

Every day the specific group for that day comes up with some ideas and inquiries and every week we will explore it.