Prep time: 20 mins.
Class time: 50 mins.
Materials:
- Enough sheets of white paper for the whole class
- Crayons, colored pencils, or markers
- Pre-made example sheets are not necessary, but helpful
These past two weeks, my first-year students have found their end of the year energy and display it in extra spurts of delighted impromptu singing, dancing, and talking. Luckily, I’ve also found an extra spurt of freedom and creativity in having finished teaching through the textbook.
The kids were disappointed to hear that no, this does not mean we can spend the next two weeks in a constant state of recreo, but I think we’ve all found a happy medium in some of the more hands-on review games and crafts that we worked on instead.
The last unit we finished in natural sciences was about plants, the bit of biology in which I specialized during university. We learned about the basics in the textbook: plants do indeed need water, air, soil, and sunlight to live. They are living things. They are composed of roots, a stem, leaves, flowers, seeds and fruit.
However, I couldn’t help but push them a little bit past these ideas, encouraging them to think about how plants can use their parts to move, find food, and reproduce. We watched several time-lapse videos (taken from the plantsinmotion project) to see how plants move towards the sun, appear to sleep, and circle their leaves in the air. Reading Rebecca Hirsch’s amazing book Plants Can’t Sit Still helped match more images to these ideas while connecting each plant’s behavior back to its need for water, sunlight, and reproduction in words that my students understood well.
After finishing the book, we got right down to the activity. I displayed each of these example sheets to the class by attaching them to the whiteboard and explained the process of seed dispersal, using the pages from Plants Can’t Sit Still as a reference. We discussed how different seeds the students were familiar with can travel from their plant to the soil and together classified them into air, water, or animal aided travel. Then I asked the students to choose one of those types of travel and copy its template from the board onto their own full-sized piece of paper. In the blank spot in the middle, they were to illustrate their own map of the seed’s journey from the starting image to the end.
The results were beautiful, creative, and funny. The seeds pictured were large and small. They wound through rivers and streams, blew over mountain ranges, and were pooped onto many new places. With their drawings in hand, I could be confident that they had understood the idea of seed dispersal well enough to add their imagination to it.
Of all the feelings both students and teachers experience on the last week the school year, contentment at the retention of material is one of the most wonderful ones. I was happy to feel this myself at the end of the class period.
Educación in English 