The Post Office

As an introduction to our unit on Community Helpers, each first grade classroom studied the Postal Workers, their various jobs within the Post Office, and how they contribute to our local communities.

We learned that a Post Office is a place where you can mail a letter, buy stamps, or send a parcel to a friend. Some postal workers are mail carriers or sorters. The "boss" of the Post Office is called the Postmaster General. We wanted to know what it felt like to be postal workers so we decided to set up our own simulated Post Office right in our classrooms!

Each student wrote a letter to a faculty or staff member in the lower school. We addressed each letter and placed the assigned zip codes in the main and return addresses. Everyone mailed his or her own letter in the blue mailbox. The postal workers were responsible for retrieving the letters out of the mailbox and checking to see that each letter had a main address, return address, and zip code. The postal workers delivered these letters to the sorters at the Sorting Center.

The sorters sorted the letters according to the zip codes. These workers then delivered the sorted letters to the mail carriers. The mail carriers and their assistants placed their assigned mail with their zip code in their trusty mailbags and delivered the letters promptly to the people within the main address.

Some of the students shared they would love to work in a post office while others said, "This is not for me!"