Nature Walk: Living and Non Living

This term, we are very excited to be embarking on a new topic.  We are going to explore living things.  But, we feel very strongly that students learn best by doing and when their learning is interactive and hands on.    We want our kids to guide their own learning.  We will not be standing at the front of the class spouting facts about different living things.  Instead the kids and their wonders will guide us.  But, before we get started we want to check for understanding and establish some background knowledge.  First order of business, a nature walk.

Armed with clipboards, magnifying glasses and pencils we headed outside.  The kids were asked to to write down everything they noticed.  We walked around the school examining trees, litter, rocks, spider webs and playground equipment.

Once inside, we sat in a sharing circle and each student shared one thing from their list.  As they shared from their list I wrote down what they shared on recipe cards.  Now we had 22 different objects from outside.  Next, we played a game where I showed a card and they had to decide whether the item was living or non- living.  We classified (a grade one process of science) our items and created a two column chart on the chalk board using masking tape.

There was a lot of great discussion and big thinking about how to tell whether an object is living or non- living.  Part way through our discussion we realized we needed to add a new column.  We decided to call this category, "used to be living" in order to provide a list for leaves that had fallen to the ground and dead spiders.

After our discussion, the students were asked to go back and work in their science notebooks.  I wanted them to classify the objects on their personal lists and record their classification in their notebooks.

This is a great opportunity to see the children's thinking skills in action.  How will they classify their own lists and how will they represent their learning?  Will they use a t-chart, a labelled diagram or a web.  These are all different tools that the students have been exposed to throughout the year from their peers and modeled by their teachers.  This open ended type of activity allows every child to succeed and show what they know.

This lesson leads nicely into our next lesson, what living things need to survive?  To be continued....

Poetry Part 2

If you are a teacher, you know there is nothing better than seeing the excitement and hearing the cheers when you tell the students what they will be doing next.  When I rolled out the overhead, the children were down right giddy that I had some more poems to share with them.  I began all three of the lessons by sharing some favourite poems on the overhead projector.  I challenged them to be poetry detectives again and identify some things they noticed (short poems, long poems, repeated words, rhyming, different shapes etc).  The trick was to keep the discussions short and lively.  I didn't want to beat the poem to death or I would run the risk of actually beating the joy right out poetry.  Below I will describe the three activities we did this week:

Lesson One:  Sort the Poems

In the first term, one of the Science processes we worked on was sorting and classifying.  The children were given the opportunity to sort and classify different objects and events (ie. leaves, shells, rocks, plastic animals, things that float, things that sink, magnetic strengths).  I decided to see if they could transfer this skill to literature.   I had photocopied a carefully selected group of poems for children.  I had 15 in all.  I made sure there were different kinds of poems in the selection.  I then put the children in groups of three and gave them the task of making a sorting rule and then sorting the poems accordingly.  When the group had sorted their poems, they raised their hands and I would come over and try to guess their sorting rule.  I would then challenge them to sort the poems in a different way.  This activity reinforced what we had talked about last day (there are many different kinds of poems).  It also gave them an opportunity to read and talk about the poems.

Lesson Two:  Drip, Drip, Drop

I got this idea from a fabulous poetry resource by Lucy Culkins.  The goal for the lesson was for the children to see that poets carefully choose how a poem should look and how the form supports what they are trying to say.  Poets carefully select words and write them in a deliberate way.  They constantly read and reread their poems until they hear exactly what they want.   I began the lesson by providing the students with an opportunity to read poems focusing on the sounds and silences.  We talked about and practised how to honour the line breaks and pauses.  After reading some poems together,  the children got into groups of three.  Each group got an envelope with the word drip on eight cards, drop on eight cards and sunshine on three cards.  I then gave them different titles and had them try to create different poems using just the words in the envelopes.  (ie. Thunderstorm or Rain is Coming).

The title given was A Thunderstorm.  The group described how
they wanted to make the poem look like a bolt of lightening

The title given was Good-Bye Rain.  The students explained how the drips were going hard at the beginning and then  slowed down until the final drop and then sunshine.

The title was Good-Bye Rain.  First the rain was heavy then slowed down.  I loved how they used the bigger spaces to show the drops were further apart and then finally stopped.

Lesson Three:  Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

I wanted the children to have another opportunity to experiment with spacing and line breaks.  I gave each group of three children the words to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on cards.  The task was for them to create their own poems using the words from the poem.  We once again talked about how poets deliberately and carefully place words.