A school of fish: Emergency Workers Unit Study and Activities

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Emergency Workers Unit Study and Activities

I thought we'd do a little unit on Policemen and Firemen for Ziggy's sake (he LOVES to pretend to be a policeman and fireman), and then it turned out there was a lot to learn about emergency workers and it wasn't such a little unit! We all enjoyed it. We had a section on Police, a section on Firefighters, and a section on EMTs and Paramedics.

Lots of video links for this unit, which will probably all be obsolete in a year or two, but oh well…

POLICE

Make a police badge

Make a traffic light (the boys liked this, for their toy cars)

Police Car Tour—pretty cool, but seeing the inside of a real police car on a field trip was even more cool!

We talked about all different kinds of police officers, so that included detectives and forensic officers too. Learning about fingerprinting, DNA, and Crime Scene Investigation was really interesting! Here's some information about fingerprints. And some ways to do your own. (Pictures of our attempts below.)

This identifying suspects activity was fun

Comfort dogs!

By far our favorite part of the police section was learning about K-9 units and how they train police dogs. This "K-9 Mounties" show about police dogs in Canada was the best and most in-depth. We watched 5 of 6 episodes (we knew we couldn't watch the one about dogs killed in the line of duty because it would make Ziggy too sad! He loves police dogs so much and wouldn't have been able to handle seeing them hurt.) Here's the first episode and you should be able to find the others from there. (The title of the show is just "K-9 Mounties.") We all love German Shepherds after watching these shows!

Here are some other police dog videos, here and here

These "Meet the Helpers" videos were annoying in some ways, but we still liked them (though the bigger kids enjoyed making fun of them a bit). Meet a police officer.