Animal Research
Collaborate with classroom teachers to work on a research project that meets their science curriculum standards. Here are some excellent resources for elementary school students:
www.kidsclick.org/midanim.html
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals
Equipment needed: computer and color printer
Software needed: Internet browser, Kidspiration or online graphic organizer software such as Webspiration or Bubblus
1. Introduce students to graphic organizer software. Explain that they will make a bubble for each fact they find about their animal. Think out loud as you demonstrate separating a bundle of facts about hawks or koalas. Model putting the facts in your own words. Model saving your document.
2. Allow students several classes to research their animal and collect their facts in the graphic organizer.
3. Demonstrate creating “super groupers” and sorting facts. Have a class discussion about how you can divide up your facts. The science teacher I collaborate with likes these categories: facts, families, and habitat.
4. Students create super groupers and sort their facts. At the end of the class they have an outline to guide their writing.
Living and Non-Living
Every year our kindergarten teachers teach a unit on how to tell whether something is living or non-living. Wangari’s Trees of Peace is a great fit for this unit. After discussing what is alive in the book and what is not, kindergarten students can show what they know using a graphic organizer.
Equipment needed: computer
Software needed: Kidspiration
1. Demonstrate Kidspiration. Show students how to scroll through the pictures and how to place a picture on the T chart.
2. Encourage students to put at least 5 images on each side of the T chart.
3. Allow students as long as needed to finish their T chart, assisting students who need additional help.
Please feel free to email me at jphillips@wswsu.org for a copy of this template if you have Kidspiration.
Animal Comic
Last year my third graders researched animals for a science unit and created animal comics to show what they learned. These were a huge hit and students were incredibly motivated to finish their work and to show them off to their families and peers.
Equipment needed: computer and color printer
Software needed: Comic Life and word processing software
1. Explain the criteria to students. Our criteria looked something like this:
Write at least 2 sentences in the third person that include facts about your animal. For example: Hello. I am a red-tailed hawk. I get my name from my cinnamon red tail. I am a large bird with rounded wings and a short tail.
Write at least 2 sentences in the third person that include facts about your animal’s habitat. For example: I can be found in most of the United States. I prefer open land where there are fields for hunting the small mammals I like to eat.
Write at least 2 sentences in the third person that include facts about your animal’s family life. For example: After my mate and I build a nest I will lay eggs. The eggs will hatch in about a month and my young will spend another 45 days or so in the nest.
2. Explain what it means to write in the third person.
3. Give students time to write their sentences, typing them into a word processing document.
4. Remind students to spell-check their sentences.
5. Show students how to find a picture of their animal. I prefer to use a public images such as those found at www.morguefile.com.
6. Demonstrate how to use Comic Life to insert an image, add speech bubbles, copy and paste text from a word processing document into the speech bubbles, and add a title.
7. Students should save their work and print it when finished.
Animating the life cycle of a plant
Second grade students study plants at our school. As a culminating activity they create a KidPix animation demonstrating their knowledge of how a plant starts as a seed, grows and flowers. The same process could yield an animation about trees.
Equipment needed: computer, color printer (optional) and projector
Software needed: drawing software such as KidPix or drawing software and presentation software (Keynote or PowerPoint)
1. Outline criteria for the animation.
2. Demonstrate “building” on a drawing. Start with a picture of the ground and sky and save as “plant 1.” Add a seed and save as “plant 2.” Continue in this fashion for a few more slides, asking students what else they need to add and saving in the same fashion.
3. Students begin working on their own pictures, building on each slide.
4. When all students have finished their slides, demonstrate putting them together into a slide show. Demonstrate changing the timing and the transitions between slides. For an animation, you want no transitions.
5. Assist students as they develop their slide shows and turn them into animations.
6. Print slide shows as a comic and allow students to cut and reassemble them to make a flip book.
8. Slide shows can be exported in the form of a QuickTime movie to be shared online or on a DVD.
