RIC-20959 Early years People - Community Helpers

Community helpers – 3
Music
• To the tune of ‘The farmer in the dell’, compose a
community helpers song with the children; for example:
‘The gardener mows the lawn, the gardener mows the
lawn. Up and down the grass he goes; the gardener
mows the lawn’. The children perform actions as they
sing.
• Attach simple outlines of hats of community helpers to
craft sticks. With children, label and name them before
playing the game. The teacher sings or chants a verse
and holds up one hat for the children to identify (call out)
who wears it. The verse is: ‘What can I be, when I wear a
hat like this? I can be a (name of worker), when I wear a
hat like this’. Selected children can be chosen to say the
verse and choose the hat.
• Puppets or pictures are needed to play this singing game.
Select one child to walk around a circle of children. All
sing: ‘When I went walking down the street, down the
street, down the street; a community helper I happened to
meet. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho’. The child walking
selects a community helper puppet or picture to dance
with and the group continues to sing: ‘A rig, a jig-jig
and away we go, away we go, away we go; a rig, a jigjig
and away we go; heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho’. The
next child is selected to walk around the circle. Refer to
pages 71 to 73 for pictures.
• Sing ‘Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?’ with
one child wearing a police officer’s hat and indicating a
particular child who is the cookie ‘thief’. Refer to
for words and instructions.
• Listen to and identify the sounds of emergency vehicles such as police and ambulance sirens.
• Sing songs, such as ‘Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick’, and ‘Who are the people in your neighbourhood?’
(from Sesame Street; see ).
• Provide simple child-size cut-outs of
different community helpers (police
officer, firefighter, doctor, nurse, dentist
etc.) and full-length mirrors. Cut out
head-size holes for the faces so the
children can use their own and see
themselves in the mirror. Play a game
where the children must place their face
in a cut-out without looking at who it is.
They then ask questions to guess who
they are. (Refer to pages 71 to 73 for
reference pictures.)
• Provide tweezers, gauze or a bandage
and a bowl of coloured water. The
children must pick up the bandage using
the tweezers and place it in the bowl of
coloured water. (Later, the bandage may
be used to create a picture.)
• Make pretend stethoscopes for dramatic
play by covering an egg carton cup with
aluminium foil. Tie string to the cup to
hang around the children’s necks.
Drama
• Teach, and ask the children to role-play, the procedure for making a
phone call to the emergency services.
• Make fire officer finger puppets from an oval
(about 3.75 cm x 6.25 cm) and a rectangle
(7.5 cm x 2.5 cm) of felt. Glue the rectangle
around the child’s ‘pointer’ finger, add marker
dots for buttons; fold the oval in half, cut a
semicircle on the fold and insert over finger for
a helmet. Use the marker to draw a face on the
child’s finger.
• Provide yellow raincoats, gumboots, plastic helmets (or ice-cream
containers cut and painted the correct colours) and pieces of garden
hoses or old vacuum cleaner hoses. Two 1-litre plastic bottles taped
together can be oxygen tanks. A fire truck can be constructed from large
packing boxes, painted red.
• Cut holes in used white pillowcases for a doctor’s or vet’s uniform. Place
stuffed animals in the play corner or dolls in beds. Provide bandages
for children to care for sick patients. The stove can become the X-ray
machine and the table for examining patients (dolls or stuffed toys).
Plastic doctor’s kits are readily available from toy shops.
• Provide bubble wrap, recycled postage stamps, envelopes, boxes, tubes,
paper, pens and a mailbox for post office play; or walkie-talkies, blue
shirts, notepads, pens, badges and hats for police officer play.
• Mark a road on a large rug or outside (using masking tape) for the
children to practise crossing the road safely.
R.I.C. Publications ® – www.ricpublications.com.au Early years themes—People—Community helpers 67
FIRE
OFFICER