Rationale
We can only care about what we know, and my desire is for these students to grow into people who care deeply about ecology and habitat conservation. By learning about animals in depth, they will develop a strong appreciation for nature that will stay with them for life. I have selected two naturalists to focus on, Linnaeus, to introduce the concept of classification and taxonomy, and Darwin, to introduce the concept of evolution and adaptation. It is interesting to note that currently, in the United States, slightly more than 50% of the public believes that Evolution is the explanation for biodiversity, as opposed to Creationism, and 20% are unsure which is true. The only other country that approaches this number of believers in Creationism is Turkey. 1 This unit is written for my group of 20 First Grade students, but can be used for Kindergarten, Grade One or Grade Two, as all study life science. I currently teach in Emery Unified School District in Emeryville, California, a small district nestled between Oakland and Berkeley. Our students come from a wide range of socio economic backgrounds and many are English Language Learners.
My students are emergent writers who exited Kindergarten with about 50 sight words and the ability to write a few short sentences. By the end of First Grade they will be writing short stories using correct punctuation and capitalization, and interesting adjectives. This unit is meant to occur early in the year, and relies upon cloze sentences (frame sentences with blank spaces), which scaffold the job of writing for these beginners. These students have had practice writing questions or having me record their questions for a bulletin board about our Language Arts unit. They are encouraged to ask questions and make connections between what we are reading about and experiences in their own lives in order to better comprehend what is being taught. They have also had experience using Science Notebooks in Kindergarten. Each Science lesson has a heading and a date, a drawing of the investigation and observations recorded by the student to the best of his/her ability. I taught the same group of students in Kindergarten last year (my school practices looping – teaching the same group for two years), and we studied the following concepts that gave them some background knowledge about animals:
- List animals that we saw at a farm
- Compare goldfish to guppies (Foss Animals Two by Two)
- Compare land snails to water snails (Foss Animals Two by Two)
- List body parts of a fish (gills, eye, fins, tail)
- List animals that we have at home as pets
This unit is meant to be taught over the course of 6 weeks and will begin three weeks after the first day of school. Our district mandated curriculum of Language Arts and Math is taught in the morning and the hour after lunch, so I will be teaching the content of this unit during the last hour of the day, and the research and writing of this unit integrated into the writing block (during the Language Arts block).
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