New Unit: Plants in Our Midst

 Transdisciplinary Theme: How We Share The Planet

Central Idea: Plants play a unique role in our lives and the lives of animals.

Lines Of Inquiry:

The features of plants in our local areas

How animals/people use plants

The needs of plants in our local area

Pulling weeds
In the formative week Deb and I will gather the children's prior knowledge on plants and questions they have that will lead our inquiry. It would seem the Fire Group knows quite a lot! After pulling weeds from the planter box and examining them with magnifying glasses and drawing a plant with leaves and roots the children had this to say . . .

Careful observations

Sophie

We eat plants. Sticks come from trees. When you pick a leaf you can't stick it back on. Flowers fall off of trees. Plants grow.

Esme

When you pick a flower it doesn't grow anymore and sometime while you're walking back to your house it dies. There are prickly plants in every forest of the world, it's true! Coyotes, wolves, and bears live in the forest. 

Rielle

Roots grow under the ground. You can find prickly plants in our forest, but not all forests. Leaves fall from trees. Some plants stop growing. Parsley is a plant you can eat.

Tyreese

Sticks fall of off trees. When the wind blows leaves fall.

Oliver

When you touch a prickly plant it hurts. People get paper from trees.

Rylan

Plants need sun, water and food. Trees have leaves. Some trees are called Maple and that's where syrup comes from. Bears live in the forest. 

Plant Illustration

The lively discussion that followed Oliver's statement "When you touch a prickly plant it hurts" helped us formulate our first question "Are prickly plants found in forests around the world?"

I read a story called "I Eat Leaves" that features animals that eat leaves, at the end the children responded to the question "Do you eat leaves?" Esme and Tyreese thought no, everyone else thought yes. After discussing the kinds of leaves people eat the children concluded "There are some leaves we eat and some leaves we don't eat" and they've made plans to create a collection of each category of leaves. It will also be a good opportunity to taste leaves we can eat!

More Plant Illustration

Community: Summative Project

 The Summative Project is an opportunity for the children to showcase all they have explored and learned in the past 7 weeks. 

Community Scenarios

The children worked together to create a scene in the community. They picked a place of work, created a problem, and decided who in the community could help and how and I helped them write a story that they acted in a presentation for the other children. 

The customer

Their Story
One day some customers went to the grocery store because they needed food to feed their families. When they arrived at the store they discovered the door was locked and the lights were all out. "Where are the grocery store workers?" Right away one of the customers thought that they must all be home sick in bed, that would be the only reason they wouldn't be at the grocery store doing their important jobs. The costumer called the doctor and asked her to go a check the grocery store workers at their house. She did and sure enough all the workers were sick in bed. She treated them with some medicine and they get better right away and went straight to work. The stock boy stocked the shelves, the cashier handled the money, the bag boy bagged the groceries. The customers were happy to see the workers open the store and bought their groceries.

The doctor

The grocery store workers

Community: Life Is Like a Fruit Salad

Our wacky learning community!

Central Idea: The work people perform helps build community

 The children had an opportunity to experience this unit's central idea by way of working together to make a fruit salad. Everyone brought fruit to contribute and the children shared the work of chopping.

Before the chopping began a discussion made a connection between the fruit salad and a community. Each piece of fruit represented someone in the community and the job they do. This is what the children decided:

The grapes were children at school

The mango was a lawyer

The banana a cleaner

One piece of cantaloupe a professional mountain climber

The other piece of cantaloupe was Santa's food shopper

A fruit salad of apple alone would be pretty boring, and just like in a community it takes all different kinds of people mixed in together, working to help one another,  to create a wonderful, interesting place to live!

After the efforts of our little learning group community, who worked together, everyone enjoyed eating the Fruit Salad Community!

Community: Jobs In Our Community

Everyday I've observed the children thinking about our Central Idea:  The work people preform helps build community as they play their imaginative games. There's been police officers in the forest, bakers at the playground, bus drivers in the forest, construction workers at the magnet tile area and so much more.

After reading Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do I listed all the jobs they could think of and then they chose a job they wanted their puppet to do. We researched images of the clothes and uniforms people wear. Byron felt challenged to draw clothing on his puppet which prompted an impromptu drawing lesson. The children learned how to draw the lines for the sleeves and pants after deciding if they were long or short, and they learned how to draw the line for the waist.

We used the puppets to play a song game - The Farmer in the Dell, 

but we changed the words to The Worker in the City! 

Community: Helping Hands

 

Just like leaves help a tree grow, helping hands help families grow!

The children recalled what jobs they do to help their family and I recorded them on their handprints. Esme helped to record the process by taking pictures and Rylan thought all the steps should be recorded including washing hands. Soon everyone wanted a turn and these pictures are the results of their efforts!

What do you want to learn?

When thinking about some of the jobs their parents do that they don't do, I was curious to find out what jobs they'd like to learn how to do. Rylan had an idea straight away "I want to learn how to drive." See the picture find out what job your child would like to learn how to do!

Community: Chores!

 Communities: People working and helping each other

In our family communities there are many jobs that need doing in everyone's home. Who's responsibility are these jobs? A Venn Diagram helped the children organize their thinking. They came up with ideas of jobs that get done and talked about who does them. We soon noticed that from their ideas there are no jobs only moms do, or only dads do, or only kids do and they concluded that "Everyone helps!" After some more discussion they agreed that when it comes to safety there are some jobs only moms and dads do and kids don't do, such as, tending fires, using chemicals and poisons, using sharp knives, and working with hot stoves and ovens. 

How Helpful Are You?
We used a graph to organize our information. The children listed the jobs they do at home then  they used stickers to indicate which of these jobs they do at home and we discovered that we have one helpful group of kids! I have to say how impressed I am with the children's emerging ability to read and use graphs, it's apparent they've had lots of experience. Most of the children could read their name, follow the column to get to the row we were working on and place their sticker without any help from me!