We Heart 1st: Science

It's that time of year when we're all excited about Spring! Birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and we're learning about plants! This year my class did a fun and EASY activity while studying plant parts and functions. Best of all...you probably have everything you need in your classroom!

We first read several books and learned about the parts of a plant and their jobs throughout the week. As a culminating activity, we created our watercolor plants and added captions for each plant part.

For the first step, we started with a directed drawing of the ground, the stem, the roots, and the leaves. I illustrated this, and they drew what I drew.

I then let the kids look up photos of flowers in books or on EPIC (using their ipads.)
This way, we would have lots of original flowers!

They then drew their flower and outlined the whole picture in black crayon.

The next step is painting with watercolors. The black crayon helps keep the watercolors from spreading and also helps define the different spaces.

After the paint has completely dried,

we cut out the pictures and glued them on blue construction paper.

While some kids were painting, the other kids started writing their captions on labels. They first wrote the captions in pencil and then went over their words in black marker. They completely came up with their descriptions on their own. I love this because they're all different!

The final steps were to add the labels to the blue paper and add the title.

If you'd like to read more about our plants unit, check out this previous blog post. Have a great week!

Have you ever studied penguins? We recently finished up our first penguin unit, and it was so much fun!

The kids each chose one of five penguin species to research: Little Blue, Rockhopper, Macaroni, Adelie, and Chinstrap. We used the Emperor Penguin as whole group practice before they began their own research.

Our school is a 1:1 ipad school. That means that every child has an ipad in the classroom. We used QR codes to help the kids find the required information on their penguins. They used their ipads to scan the code and then used the info found in each code to complete their data collection sheets.

Once the data collection was complete, they created keynote presentations on their penguins. (You could easily create posters, books, or powerpoints as well.)

Our fabulous technology specialist on campus created thinglinks for them to use when they completed the required tasks. They were able to use these to gather more information. I also purchased sets from Scholastic to use in reading groups throughout the week.