Student Activities
To introduce this unit, we will start with the initial life cycle study. Students will be introduced to key vocabulary, parts of a plant, and their functions. This component is crucial and not to be overlooked for this age group. Providing purposeful exposure to new words impacts a student’s reading comprehension and future academic success.
The seed in a bag activity. Students will engage in planting a seed in a bag with a wet paper towel. I give the students a lima bean, a wet paper towel, and a Ziploc bag. The students “plant” the seeds and hang them on a window with direct sunlight. They log journal predictions and observations over the course of several days in a special plant journal I will provide for them. Students will be introduced to photosynthesis by the reading of Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life. With the shared reading and rich vocabulary introduction, students will then take part in a shared writing and building a pictorial anchor chart to express their knowledge of photosynthesis in its most basic form. I will instil in the students that plants take in light, air, and water into the plant to make sugar which is what they use as food for the plants to grow. Then the plants give off what they didn’t use back into the air (O2). With the conclusion of their seed activity, students will have been exposed to the most basic form of photosynthesis in the form of read aloud and videos. We will tie this back to their seeds and how plants are solar powered.
Students will engage in the planning of a classroom community garden. They will bring seeds from home to plant, watch, and grow. I will use a window box or small plastic pool for our classroom garden. The students will observe plants growing in partial shade, and direct sunlight. They will observe and note the differences. We will have many class discussions on the plant growth and the photosynthetic process. Students will measure growth of the plants using nonstandard units of measurement throughout the month of plant growth. Investigating, observing, and describing are all essential to students this age. This activity will allow the students to observe how the food they eat grows and where it comes from. The students will use these often while taking part in the classroom community garden. We will conclude the garden and tie it to fruits and vegetables being solar powered.
We will conclude with the tie back that we are solar powered. At this point, students have learned how essential the sun is to the life cycle of a plant and their community garden. They have been introduced to the basic concepts of photosynthesis. We will wrap up the unit with a shared writing activity. First, the students will be shown energy pyramids depicting energy flow in a community. This will show producers and consumers of energy and the food chain. Second, the students will take part in a fruit and veggie sampling from our classroom community garden. Lastly, the students will take part in a shared writing demonstrating all of their learning. The students will be told that they are going to create a story together to tell other kids about how the sun gives plants energy, and we in turn are solar powered. I will be facilitating this with the class whole group. Students will have the opportunity to provide illustrations and cover art for their class book.
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