Some Mamie Martin Elementary Students are learning what it meansto be community helpers just in time for the Thanksgiving holidays,whether it’s helping feed people or keeping them safe, healthy orhappy.

“Our job is important because your teeth could not survivewithout us,” said Mamie Martin students Hannah Arnold and EmilyGrace Boutwell Friday at their “Be a Worker Day” program, whichfeatured community helpers.

Forty-two second-graders dressed as their favorite communityworkers: Airline pilots, mail carriers, construction workers,cashiers and firefighters were among the group that presented toparents, teachers and friends Friday morning.

Members of Linda Lowman and Laura Ann Walker’s classes startedwhat amounted to a large-scale educational event off with a cannedfood drive, where they encouraged children from all over the schoolto donate items to the St. Vincent de Paul food pantry, whichoperates through St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church inBrookhaven. Working together, the two second-grade classescollected more than 800 cans for their community serviceproject.

“Every year the school does this,” Lowman said. “The childrenmade posters and visited the other classes to ask for donations,and did really well.”

In addition, Lowman said, the children were able to learn aboutseveral other things through the idea of “helping thecommunity.”

“They each chose occupations that help the community run moresmoothly,” Lowman said. “They researched each one, what kind ofeducation you need to do it, where they work, what they do and whattools they use.”

And after that, community helpers of all descriptions came tospeak to the children’s classes, letting them know a little abouttheir jobs.

The lessons of helping the community through the food drive andvarious jobs translated not only to the obvious subjects such asreading and writing, but also to math class, where the studentslearned to graph their progress with the cans they’d collected.They also were able to study basic two-digit addition in tallyingup their can totals.

Lowman said during a time of year where the focus is on givingthanks, it’s also a great time for the children to develop a newperspective on people who give back to the community as well.

“This is always a great project for this time of year,” shesaid. “It always works well at Thanksgiving because we put anemphasis on community service.”

And the children learned that the grownups that do the jobs theychose to research are often doing jobs that are much more importantthan what they might seem to a second-grader.

“Our job is important because we decide who goes to jail,” said”judges” Brock Wells and Juwan McCall.

Students also got to learn about the challenges and duties ofthe livelihoods they chose to research.

“We think being a police officer is really hard and rewarding,”said Graham Kergosein and Blake Stevenson.