Many of my students are learning about community helpers.  I needed some additional activities to use with my students to help them learn about these different members of the community, what they do, and where they work so I created a set of 3 activities/games to target these skills.  The set includes Community Helper Bingo, 2 different “I Have…Who Has…? Community Helper Games, and Community Helper Task Cards – Where Do They Work.  I’m super excited about these new games/activities and I wanted to share about how I have been using them with many of my students. 

This week I have been playing Community Helper Bingo with several of my therapy groups.  I always like playing Bingo games with my students because they are easy to set up and you can change up the level of difficulty depending on your students’ skill set.  For this bingo game I created 8 different boards and not each board has the exact same community helper members on it.  This means the students really have to look at their boards and see if they have the community helper member on it because they won’t have them all.  I included 30 different common community helper members in this bingo game. 

There are several ways use can play this game with your students.  I made 2 different level cards depending on your students’ skill level.  Level 1 cards have the visual of the community helper member and the written word.  If your students are just starting to learn about community helpers you can use this game to model and teach about these community helper members.  For example; you can hold up the card, say the community helper member, describe what the person does, and then have your student find the person on their board.  For some of my students, I had them pick the card and name the community helper member by looking at the visual of the person.  If they could not name the person I first gave them a choice of 2 answers.  For instance, after my student turned over the dentist card and could not name the person I said “Is this a teacher or a dentist”.  Giving choices may help your student be able to provide the correct answer.  Then you can describe what they dentist does as they try and find the dentist on their bingo board.  

You can use these Level 1 cards the same way if your student has an AAC device.  After showing my student the card I had him/her find/name the community helper members on their device.  I think it is an important skills to be able to find those different people on their devices.  Again, after the student picks the bingo card they can use the visual support of the card to find the person on their device.  The student can find pilot on their device and then see if they have the pilot on their bingo board.

If my student has difficulty finding the community helper member on their AAC device I again provide choices.  I may point to 2-3 different community helper members on their device and have the student identify the correct person.  If they still cannot identify the person then I would model on their device the name of the community helper.     

This actually turned into answering yes/no questions for one of my students with an AAC device.  When she looked at the community helper member she would say “yes” or “no” on her device to indicate if she had the community helper member on her board.  Then I started asking her and the other student in the group if they had the community helper member on their bingo board.  This was great practice for those yes/no questions while still working on identifying community helpers.  Even after answering the yes/no question you can still have your student find the person on their device.  Next time I would work on saying “yes garbage collector” or “yes I have garbage collector”.  There are always so many ways to adapt and change the activity depending on what your students do during the session.     

I made the Level 2 cards to make it more challenging for my students after they have learned about what some of these community helper members do.  For Level 2 I read the student the card first without the visual support of the card.  The students still have the additional visual support of their Bingo board to help them figure out which community helper member goes with the given description.  For example; “this person takes pictures”.  Then I would wait for my student to answer “photographer”.  If my student is having a difficult time answering I provide them a verbal choice of 2-3 answers such as “teacher, photographer, or dentist” before I show them the card.  If they are still having difficulty identifying the correct community helper member you can provide them the additional support of the visual on the card.

Playing games is a motivating way to target different language skills.  There are many different ways you can use this bingo game with your students.   

If you are interested in this Community Helper Bingo Game check it out on TPT with the link – Community Helper Game Pack.  I’ll be sharing more about the other community helper games in this set in the upcoming weeks!