Building a Community with Essential Services

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 As a part of our Grade 2 "How we Organize Ourselves" unit, students chose an essential service, created an essential service with clay and then researched that essential service. They also had to justify why they felt that service was essential to the community. 

After students made their essential service, they considered which other elements were needed for their community.

As a class we then co-constructed the community together. After the community was made, I introduced different variables and scenarios. For example "a robber appears" which had an easy solution as we had a police station. "A house is on fire," is another problem our community could solve as we had a fire station.

Gradually though, issues became more apparent as garbage piled up, potholes appeared on the roads and sewage had nowhere to go. Our citizens were also becoming ill due to not having any clean water to drink. It was at this point that students made the realization of which essential services might make this community a little more functional.

A view of the sewage, dirty water, waste disposal and pleathora of sick people at the hospital due to not having access to clean drinking water.

To view the research template, please look at the document below.

For research I created readings using ChatGPT with prompts such as "Create a non-fiction text of 300 words at a Grade 2 level about the service x. Talk about what the service looks like, who works there, what tools they use for their job and why it is an essential service." Of course the texts then required a review to make sure they were factual. Students also used image searches to look at photos of what the service looks like and photos of who works there. Students were assessed using a co-constructed rubric that was then posted onto Toddle.

Overall we learned a lot about communities and essential services, in addition to thinking about what makes something an essential service or not, and reflecting on all the essential services needed for a community to thrive.

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