Preschool teachers should use holiday awareness activities to supplement classroom instruction. Labor Day provides an excellent opportunity to incorporate reading skills. Teachers can read short biographies of people who made major contributions to working America, like Henry Ford and Sam Walton. FirstSchool.com has "Community Helper" printable alphabet cards that teachers can download for no charge. Children will learn the names of workers while they improve phonics and letter knowledge.
Preschoolers enjoy hands-on activities. Crafts give children the opportunity to improve motor skills while teaching them about specific themes. Labor Day crafts include making cards to give to family members. They can draw their own pictures to decorate the cards or cut pictures out of magazines that depict people working in a variety of jobs. Students can also use socks or paper sacks to make "working people" puppets.
Field trips are a good learning experience because they allow kids to see "real world" situations. There are several fun and educational Labor Day field trips that will help children see the importance of workers. The class could visit a local post office and see how the mail arrives and gets sorted for delivery. They could visit a newspaper office to see how papers are printed. If field trips are not an option, the teacher may arrange for local workers to visit the school, explain how they perform their jobs and allow the kids to ask questions.