Art, Design, and Biology

Introduction

On a 6-day backpacking trip along Virginia’s Appalachian Trail, I was struck with awe by the diversity beneath my hiking boots. At times, I walked on white sand, soft dirt, coal and other rocks, and through tall grasses. As I looked beyond the trail, I could imagine the tectonic plates breaking beneath Earth’s surface and pushing the land into the dramatic and beautiful mountain-scape before me millions of years ago, while in others, I could see fertile pastures manicured by humans with cows grazing for miles. All the while, I was hiking through a heat wave, just hoping to come across a water source with enough flow to filter water for my own hydration¹.

Exploring Earth’s Natural Resources through Art explores how the planet Earth’s resources contribute to past, current and future landscapes. The unit will integrate science and art as students investigate how the planet earth’s resources can be used responsibly.

This interdisciplinary unit will focus on understanding the Virginia Earth Resources Standards while strengthening and emphasizing close observation and language skills. Two further enduring understandings of this unit include:

1. Close observation provides the opportunity to deeply understand and describe Earth’s natural resources, such as air, water, minerals, and undeveloped land.
2. Human actions can positively or negatively impact the resources we have. Small everyday changes can make local or global impacts.

I teach First Grade in Richmond, VA, a small city with a complex history and geological landscape. Richmond, VA sits on the fall line of the James River, which served as an important waterway for the Native Americans and the British colonists, and which will form a central element in the unit. Richmond, VA also sat as the capital of the confederacy and continues to grapple with the telling of its own history as a major trading post of enslaved people after the termination of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Today, the river divides the city into the north side and south side and is often referred to as the city's playground. Students and families picnic, enjoy swimming and sitting on rocks, and raft along the river.

My school sits in a neighborhood less than a mile away from the banks of the river. We serve a population that is about 60% Black, 20% White, and 20% Hispanic. While this unit will hold a special significance to students familiar with Virginia and the James River in Richmond, it contains important critical thinking opportunities for students anywhere to consider their role in understanding and conserving earth’s resources. Educators can modify images and case studies to reflect their local landscapes or to discuss the global implications of conserving and protecting Earth’s natural resources. This unit is designed for First Grade but can be easily adapted to K-12 classrooms. In addition, this unit focuses on the observation and discussion around paintings and images, making it especially applicable and useful in classrooms with diverse, multilingual learners.

Through the close study of nature through painting and realia, material objects to supplement teaching and learning, students will explore how descriptive language more thoroughly represents their observation and understanding of a topic. Students will focus on the natural resources of Virginia’s water, air, and undeveloped land across time, with a particular emphasis on the James River, Chesapeake Bay, and the mountain region. Students will use artwork to inspire inquiry into different causes of changing landscapes, from human trash to human technology, and consider the ways in which they have agency to protect and conserve the earth’s resources.

Throughout First Grade, students in Richmond Public Schools study the skills of close observation through the EL Education curriculum. This unit will directly connect the skills of close observation to the importance of early science discovery. Prior to the emergence of scientific classification in the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, species and landscapes were documented in descriptive language and representational art. The use of adjectives by early scientists, mirrors the ways in which First graders learn to manipulate and use vocabulary to strengthen their descriptive skills. This unit expects students to strengthen their use of descriptive language as they closely observe art and nature in order to appreciate the specificity language provides.