Book 4: Make Way For Ducklings

Standards:

K-2.3 Identify people in the community and school who enforce the rules that keep people safe, including crossing guards, firefighters, and police officers.

Summary:

Make Way For Ducklings is a book about a duck couple in search of a home to have their babies. They try several different places but none of them seem to be right to raise a family. Once place had no food, the other had wild animals, and one was just too dangerous because of all of the human traffic. Finally they find the perfect place and they make friends with a policeman named Michael who feeds them peanuts every day. Mrs. Mallard lays her eggs and they quickly hatch into eight ducklings. Mrs. Mallard taught the ducklings how to swim and find food and finally she taught them how to walk. One day they waddled until they came to a highway but there were too many cars and the Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings were in trouble. None of the cars were stopping for them and then Michael the policeman came to the rescue! He blew his whistle and stopped traffic so that Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings could cross the highway. He called in for reinforcements and four more policemen came and stopped traffic completely so the ducks could walk straight into the public garden where Mr. Mallard was waiting for them. The ducklings thanked the policemen and were happy to be in their new home.

Objectives:

The students will come up with a list of class rules and have an officer of the week who will be expected to enforce these rules.

Materials:

Book: Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey

Poster Board

Marker

Police badge

Procedure:
1. The teacher will read the book Make Way For Ducklings to the class.
2. During the read, the teacher will point out that the police officers stopped traffic so that the ducks could cross the road to the pond without being harmed.
3. The teacher will talk to the students about what police officers do and how they are important to the community because they enforce the rules and protect people in the community (and animals too!).
4. The teacher will talk about the importance of rules and having people to enforce the rules because it is a way that we are protected.
5. Together as a class, the teacher and the students will make a list of their own classroom rules for their classroom community.
6. The rules will be decided on together and the class must abide by the rules that the students have come up with.
7. Once the rules have been placed and agreed upon in the classroom there will be a police person of the week that will enforce those rules in the classroom by nicely reminding a student when he or she has broken one of the rules.
8. Each week the police person will change so that each student will have an understanding of what it feels like to be a rule enforcer in their classroom community.