Activities
Yerba Buena High School students have a kitchen garden located on campus, which my students will visit. They grow crops and have a composting center where they compost the wastage from the school cafeteria. Before we go on the trip, I will give a brief overview of what they need to pay attention to, and the observations students need to make. Students will go on a tour of the garden to learn about the crops planted, the produce they sell, the composting process, and the watering mechanisms that are used. Students will learn about the amount of time it takes for the composting process to become complete. Students will come back to class and write in their notebook about their observations from their field trip experience. They will then research about the crops that they saw in the garden and write notes about the best time of the year to grow them, the amount of time it takes for the plant to produce fruit from the time it is a seed, the frequency of the watering necessary, and the worms that need to be added to the compost bins to help degrade the food particles.
The experiments and research work on identifying crops grown in California are included in this unit to build students research, data gathering, analyzing, and interpreting skills. Experiment 1 will be conducted to learn about how a plants growth is impacted by varied amounts of water. The variable in this experiment will be the amount of water given to a plant. I will divide students into groups of four. I will assign to each group a fixed amount of water for their plant, and the frequency of the watering schedule. Students will take notes in a notebook and record data as they progress through the experiment. They will create a table for both experiment 1, and experiment 2, with the following columns: Serial number, date, quantity of water given to the plant, and plant growth observation. This experiment will be done over a period of eight weeks. At the end of experiment 1, students will learn how water impacted their plant. They should be able to conclude if their group over watered, under water, or gave sufficient water to the plant. Based on the health of their plant, they will know how plants react to water. They will then write a conclusion paragraph about what they learned from their experiment, and the status of their plant. Experiment 2 will be conducted to learn about how a plant’s growth is impacted based on the type of soil and compost used. I will have three types of soil in the classroom. Type 1 soil will be soil from the school open space, type 2 soil will be potting soil, and type 3 soil will be potting soil with mulch on the top of the pot. The variable in this experiment will be the soil used. Again, I will divide students into groups of four. Each group will have a different type of soil to work with. All the students will give the same amount of water to their plant, and the frequency of the water will also be the same. Students will measure the amount of water and then water their plant. Students will take notes in a notebook and record data as they progress through the experiment. They will make entries in the table as they progress through the experiment. This experiment will also be done over a period of eight weeks. At the end of the second experiment, students will learn how soil impacted their plant’s growth. They will then write a conclusion paragraph about what they learned from their experiment, and the status of the plant.
To conclude this unit, students will research and learn about the wet months, sunny months and the crop growing season in California. Then, they will identify various crops grown in California. Later, they will select one crop of their choice and go in depth about the growing season for that crop, the optimal temperatures required to grow that crop, the water requirements for that crop, pesticides if any are used, and if so, what the pesticide is, the areas the crop is grown in California, and the places the crop is exported to. They will then write a conclusion summary of their findings. Later, they will prepare a slides presentation of their research and share it with the class.
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