After a visit from Miss Molecule, our friendly classroom scientist, students demonstrated a keen interest in plants, and plant life cycles. We have planted bean plants in yogurt containers (a child-initiated, eco-conscious idea from one of our SK's), and have been anxiously watching them grow over the past few weeks. Students have been very proactive in taking care of their plants, and were able to notice in great detail the small changes their plants made over time. Wonders emerged from this activity, such as: -where do seeds come from? -why does it take so long for plants to grow so little? -how come some people's plants aren't even growing and other's are really tall?
We have pulled some non-fiction books from our school library, plus sifted through our classroom library to find books on plants and trees. We will spend next week researching plant information in small groups, and work on creating a classroom book to add to our collection of student-created books. We have also used this opportunity to reteach elements of non-fiction, such as labels, glossary, table of contents, etc. We talked about the importance of bold text as an indication of an important word, and how its definition can be located in a glossary. We are hoping some students may choose to feature certain words in their writing and put a definition in the glossary.
A next step for us would be to take a closer look at the non-fiction texts and classify them (i.e. all about book, a book that answers questions about one topic, etc.) as is suggested in Chapter 3.
After a visit from Miss Molecule, our friendly classroom scientist, students demonstrated a keen interest in plants, and plant life cycles. We have planted bean plants in yogurt containers (a child-initiated, eco-conscious idea from one of our SK's), and have been anxiously watching them grow over the past few weeks. Students have been very proactive in taking care of their plants, and were able to notice in great detail the small changes their plants made over time. Wonders emerged from this activity, such as:
ReplyDelete-where do seeds come from?
-why does it take so long for plants to grow so little?
-how come some people's plants aren't even growing and other's are really tall?
We have pulled some non-fiction books from our school library, plus sifted through our classroom library to find books on plants and trees. We will spend next week researching plant information in small groups, and work on creating a classroom book to add to our collection of student-created books. We have also used this opportunity to reteach elements of non-fiction, such as labels, glossary, table of contents, etc. We talked about the importance of bold text as an indication of an important word, and how its definition can be located in a glossary. We are hoping some students may choose to feature certain words in their writing and put a definition in the glossary.
A next step for us would be to take a closer look at the non-fiction texts and classify them (i.e. all about book, a book that answers questions about one topic, etc.) as is suggested in Chapter 3.
VC and CG