Introduction

Through this lesson students will get an opportunity to dig deeper in their own community. They will work in groups and individually to do research about different community helpers, which they will be able to then share in a group presentation. This can be geared toward different grade levels by simply adding more components to the research by having them research more details about the specific community members.

This lesson will have students use online sources to discover more about the different community helpers available to them in their community. The students will be working together to discover information about these community members, then generating a thought out letter to a neighbor in their community about their helper that they researched. The end presentation will be a round robin display of their decorated life size helper and their letter they wrote to their neighbor.
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Learners

This lesson is geared toward 2nd and 3rd grade social studies and art with the incorporation of the decorating of the life size model of the helper.

To complete this assignment: students need to be familiar with the internet and understand how to use the information from different websites. The students need to know how to compile a few pieces of information to create a message. It would also be important for the students to understand the letter format.

Curriculum Standards
The Objectives of this lesson:

By the end of this lesson students will demonstrate their ablity to work with peers by successfully completing two products to turn in at the end of the activity.

By the end of this lesson students will demonstrate their understanding of a particular community member by writing a letter to a fictional family about the information they have gathered on the community member.

By the end of this activity students will demonstrate their understanding of reasearching information using online resources to gather the proper information needed to complete their projects.

By the end of this activity students will be able to generate a work of art using their aquired knowledge of the community member they have been studying.

By completion of this web quest the students will know more about their own community and how to work with other class members to generate a finished presentation. The different Social Studies standards that this lesson addresses are as follows:

• Social Sciences Standards for 2nd grade.
  • Students will be working towards learning more about the community they live in by studying parts of the community
• Writing Standards for 2nd grade.
  
  • Students will work toward writing a final peice of writing with proper conventions and grammer
• Art Standards for 2nd grade
  • Students will work to create their own peice of art to convey a message.

This lesson encourages various types of thinking. Through out this lesson students will be problem solving with peers when looking at what types of information to keep for the final letter, they will also have to be using observation and categorization when deciding what information is most valuable when searching through the given websites. At the end of the process students will be given the opportunity to work together to produce their life size model of their assigned helper. Through this activity students will be able to use their creativity to create this visual for the class and school to see. Because they will be working with their peers through out most of the activity they will have to use social skills to make sure the project runs smoothly.

Process

To get all the information to help our new family we must follow a few steps!!

Step 1(day1-- 10 minutes): First the students will be put into different neighborhoods with about four other classmates, to make about 5 groups. Each group will receive a specific community member helper to do research on!!

Step 2(day 1--30minutes and 2--30 minutes): Now that the students have the community member that you will be researching, they can now start looking for information! Your will give out a questionnaire to record and help guide you as to what information this family is looking for!! Remind students that pictures are also wonderful sources so they can use them as references, when making a kid size figure of their member later on in the week. There may not be enough time to find all the information they need in one sitting at the computer. So two days should be given to do their research.

*For this step it will be useful to have several parent vollunteers to help students wade through some of the sites that aren't as easy to read. It also may be a great collaboration activity to have 4th or 5th grade buddies come down to help the students do research for their material.

Here are the online resources for their different community members! Good Luck!

Fire Fighter
site number one
site number two
site number three

Police Officer
site number one
site number two

Librarian
site number one
site number two

Teacher
site number one
site number two
site number three

Doctors
site number one
site number two
site number three

Step 4 (day 3--20 minutes): Give the students feed back on what a great job they have done! Let them know that "Now that you have all this fantastic information to help your new neighbors we need to make sure all the information you collected is helpful! Get together with your group and decide what information will be of most help to the new family!" Then you will hand out a graphic organizer that will help them organize all of their great research!

It may be helpful to give each person a job:
Recorder: writing the information down
Discussion leader: you're the person who keeps the conversation/activity on task
Topic one: you pick a certain topic everyone was assigned to research (perhaps you are the person who asks questions about what tools this person uses)
Topic two: You do the same as topic one but pick a different topic (perhaps you are the person who asks questions and gathers information about what kinds of ways they help the community)
Topic three: same as topic one and two you just choose another topic of research to gather and ask questions about the information that was found.

Step 5(day 4-- 45 minutes): The students and their group will write an informative letter (with the information on their group's graphic organizer) to the new family about their community member to put on the back of their kid sized model they will make in the next step! The letters should be a couple paragraphs long. You may need to have them write a rough draft first then have all students in the neighborhood re-read it then if time permits they could type it up, nice handwriting is also just fine. It is ultimately up to you!

Step 6(day 5-- 45minutes): Time to show the community what their helpful member looks like. Have the students pick a member of their neighborhood to trace on a piece of white butcher paper that you give to them and their neighborhood. After they have traced a member then it's up to them to craft an outfit/uniform out of construction paper available in the room and other art materials that are available to them!

Things to keep in mind putting on their community member helper:
- Tools they use
- What they wear that helps them help you!
- What shows the community that this is what they are (examples: Badges, name tags…)

Remind them to get creative and have fun!!

Step 7(day 6--30-45minutes): Time to get ready to present their wonderful community member!

So what will happen during our presentations?
- The student will get a portion of the room to call their neighborhood!
- The student will post their community member in that area of the room and for the presentation time they will put your letter about their member out on the table in front of your person. Each person needs to have a couple pieces of information about their person to share with your community members that come over to your neighborhood!
- Two neighborhoods at a time will go around and look at the other neighborhoods and write information they learn about their community members. They will use the graphic organizers provided by you, to gather information!

Step 8(day 6): Put on your name on your presentation graphic organizer, and make sure all of your neighborhood members have put their names on the back of your kid size community member helper, and your letter turn them all into the teacher at the end of the day so your teacher can post all your letters and community members in the school so we can help the rest of our student community know more about how our community members can help them!!

Variations

If you only have a few days you could take out the "kid sized model of the community member."

If you don't have a computer lab you could use classroom computers in shifts through out the day.

If there are a lack of classroom parent helpers to help with the research portion of the assignment then I would implement the previously given idea of a buddy class coming and helping them look up information during the given time.

For students who may need extra help a buddy may be a great tool to use during the whole process.

For students who need an extra challenge give them more information to look for on the given websites.

Resources Needed

What may be needed for this lesson are as follows:

• enough computers for every student in class or enough for every pair
• parent helpers or a buddy class
• access to the internet
• Printers
• Art supplies/butcher paper/sissors/glue

Like I said you will need some help during the research portion of this activity, where students will need to team up with a parent or another older student to read harder material and wade through the large amount of materials on some pages to get to the important information.

Evaluation

This will be a successful lesson if the students have shown that they learned something about working with others to create a finshed well written and created finished product. Every group will end up with one letter and one "kid sized model of their community member" they will each have two sheets of paper with information on them. The first will be the questionaire from their research the second will be the graphic organizer from their experience with the presentations. You will grade them on the following things:

Conclusion

My hope is that this lesson gives your students a fun and integrated way of learning about their own community. Hopefully it raises more questions about how they can go out and help their community in the future. Good luck and feel free to contact me if you have any questions at all. Thank you!

Credits & References

Title Picture: Community Helpers