Rationale
There has been a major effort in our district to provide opportunities for students to experience, engage, enjoy, and appreciate nature in the world, specifically in Richmond, Virginia. Now that students are showing an interest in nature, I want to build on their passion to show the students how our lives have been influenced and inspired by nature. Several schools across Richmond Public Schools have community gardens, garden beds, native plants/flowers, bird feeders, and more. I would like to move my students from just engaging with nature and teach them how scientists and engineers mimic various elements of nature to help us in our daily lives.
As a general education teacher in a collaborative class setting, I am constantly looking for methods and means to make the curriculum I teach more relatable, relevant, and engaging to ALL of my kindergarten students. In the kindergarten curriculum, students will be learning about living and nonliving things; however, it does not go into depth about how living and nonliving things relate to one another. By giving students a kindergarten-level introduction to biomimicry, students will be able to make more connections between learning in the science curriculum and experiences and objects in their everyday lives. Young students, especially those with special needs, require more hands-on and personally relevant activities to further connect them to what they are learning and they will receive that from this unit.
This unit is valuable for students in urban settings because a vast majority of these students do not get the opportunity to interact, explore, and begin to discover the natural world around them. Students need to appreciate what nature has contributed to our modern society. Many of our problems whether medical or mechanical have been, and still are, being solved by mimicking nature. I hope this unit will provide some more background knowledge and answer many students’ “why” questions about nature and our society.
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