Learning Context
	The purpose, objective, or focus of the learning experience:

Focus:

After many learning experiences in finding out who community helpers are and what they do, the children will identify a community helper to focus on. Each child will be encouraged to focus on a community helper (preferably one not already mentioned). Each child will draw a picture of that occupation and dictate a sentence that tells about the occupational role. With the teacher's help, the pictures will be placed on a quilt background. Just as each square is important to the whole quilt, each of our community helpers is important to our community. If we didn't have one of our helpers, a job wouldn't get done. If one of the squares in the quilt is missing, the quilt is not complete. We are all interdependent.

1. Students will need to make informed economic decisions in daily life.
   
   
2. This activity also connects to English Language Arts through shared reading experiences about families and careers and the interviewing techniques learned when questioning visitors representing some careers.
   
   
3. This unit also supports the social realm of the kindergarten curriculum through play centers using prop boxes to act out a variety of careers.

Standards and Performance Indicators:

Through the learning experience, Community Helpers, Kindergarten children begin to meet social studies learning standards 3 and 4. It assesses performance indicators under those standards as follows:

Standard 3 - Geography

• Study how people, live, work, and utilize natural resources

Standard 4 - Economics

• Know some ways individuals and groups satisfy their basic needs and wants by utilizing scarce resources
  
  
• Investigate how production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services are economic decisions with which all societies and nations must deal

What Students Need to Know - Prior Knowledge:

1. Some family members need to work outside the home to earn money to buy things the family needs such as food, clothing, shelter.
2. A family is a group of people who may live together. They feel a responsibility to care for each other.

What Students Need to be Able to Do:

1. Form an image of a worker.
2. Understand what the worker does.
3. Express the image of the worker and what he/she does in pictorial form.
4. Write or dictate a descriptive sentence focusing on the role of the worker.
5. Share their work: read own dictated sentence and tell about the picture.