Carnation Experiment

We've been having a blast learning about plants in my Kindergarten / 1st Grade Student Teaching placement. This week, we learned the parts of a plant (root, stem, flower, leave) and what their role is to help the plant survive. We talked about how the stem carries the water and nutrients from the roots up to the rest of the plant. To see this in action, I put together the classic carnation experiment. We put white carnations in colored water. I just put about five drops of food coloring in the water, then mixed it around. I also put one of the carnations in water with no food coloring to show that this flower will not have a color change. For best results, ask for the flowers to be fresh!!

Here is a picture of our flowers the morning we put them in water!

 

 Students took predictions to what they thought would happen, and recorded them on this data sheet. The experiment can also be done with celery! Some students thought that the stem and flower would change, others thought just the flower would change, and one student thought that nothing would change! They were very excited to wait and see what would happen. By the end of the day, there was a little color on the tips of the flowers, but not much. Within 24 hours the flowers will start to show a lot of color on the tips and inside of the flower!

We let the flowers sit all weekend, and this is what we came back to!

Pretty colors!!!!

We discussed what this meant about the stem and it's duty as a part of the plant. Students were very excited and truly learned from this experiment. Every time I asked them what the stem does after that, everyone immediately answered that it carries the water through the whole plant to the flower! I had students write about the experiment during writing time as they drew and described what happen. Below is my example of what I wrote!

Overall, very fun activity!! We are going to keep up flowers in the water all week and see how bright we can get them!! The best colors that showed up for us were BLUE and YELLOW (surprisingly)!

Had an awesome time with this, and hope to do it again something!

Miss Underwood

The Hungry Little Caterpillar

This was just an awesome creative lesson that I wanted to share!! Our speech therapist brought it in for the students, and it was big hit!!!

The caterpillar from the story was made out of a sock died green. The sock was stuck through paper plates that had the different foods that the caterpillar ate through his journey.

Here is a link to the best template I found for the project!

http://plantspress.blogspot.com/2012/04/very-hungry-caterpillar-retelling.html

Here are pictures of our work!!

Such a fun time, and great for retelling the story!!


Miss Underwood

Butterfly Life Cycle

The class I am student teaching in is preparing for a field trip to the IMAX and Putnam museum. We will be watching an IMAX film on butterflies!! The students are very excited about our trip, and we have been doing some education on butterflies, specifically their features and life cycles, throughout the week.

Today, we created a butterfly life cycle wheel. The resources I found were from my mentor teacher, and I could not locate the original source. Yet, I did find a website that offered a similar template (http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/pz-butterfly-life-cycle.html).

Students colored the pictures of the four main life cycles. (1. Egg, 2. Caterpillar, 3. Cocoon, 4. Butterfly) We then pinned the wheel onto a paddle, also included in the template of the website. Then, we practiced spinning the wheel and talking about the life cycle of a butterfly.

This was a fun project, and the students did a great job coloring!! Great to use for other cycles such as the water cycle, plant life cycle and much more!!

Happy to share! :)

Miss Underwood

Magic E - A Lesson in Long Vowel Sounds

Long A Vowel Sound

This was my first week to start teaching some of my own lessons in the classroom. This particular lesson was geared toward spelling, writing and reading words with the Long A vowel sound. Since the beginning of the school year in August, students have been working with short vowel sounds only, so this was their first experience with the long vowel sounds. They were familiar that the letter "a" had two sounds, but just never used the long a sound in reading or writing lessons. The lesson specifically focused on the CVCe pattern, introducing the Magic E.

I found an awesome lesson idea from (http://blog.maketaketeach.com/diy-magic-e-wands/) This site provides a free template with short a words such as "cap" or "tap" with a star at the end of the words. Students each were made a wand with the letter "e" in the star, for the Magic E. Students placed their star from the wands at the end of the short a words, and then read the new word with the long a vowel. I really liked this concept because it still had students practice reading words with the short a sound, and introduced them to the long a sound and how to recognize the words with that Magic E on the end. I used a lot of cueing "Magic E makes "A" say it's name! A-A-A-!!!" and students were successful in correcting their mistakes and reading the words with long and short vowel sounds!

I showed an example first and then had students take turns to read the words with both the short and long vowel sounds. The awesome thing about this website is that the template provides words for all vowels, and not just one! I plan to introduce the rest of the long vowel sounds using this strategy as well. The students loved it, and it was effective in teaching the concept!! I look forward to using it again in the future!

Miss Underwood