Habitats
Lesson Overview:
Using the photos from the gallery at the following link, students can demonstrate their knowledge of habitats.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52276388@N04/galleries/72157624429257391/
Standards: Students will understand that living and nonliving parts make up an environment or habitat. They will understand the characteristics of and living/nonliving makeup of each of 5 haitats.
Target Age: Grade 2
Procedure:
1. Introduce the lesson by showing students the picture of the desert. Ask them what habitat the photo represents. When "desert" is established, students will blog their responses to the following questions.
How do you know which habitat this is?
What other plants and animals could fit into this picture?
2. Continue the same format for the next four pictures located in th flickr gallery
for forests, rainforests, wetlands, and oceans
Assessment
Written work will be assessed for accuracy of knowledge.
Extension:
This gallery can become a wiki page for students to add photos, facts, and comments.
Each photo could be a page for students to add images of animals, plants, other environments, etc. to create a more vivid representation.
This is a great way to use images! You might also consider using image cropping techniques to show just the center (small part of the image) and show more and more of the images through a series of cropped images. At each step, you can have students write (blog) about what they think, what clues in the image leads them to make their conclusions.
ReplyDeleteYou can start with the smaller view and ask students to hypothesize, then with the larger views you can ask students to make generalizations about what they see and then with the full image, you can ask students to share their conclusions. Each of these is a mini lesson which scaffolds different parts of the scientific method :)
When I was an SBTS in Fairfax County, our SBTS management group used this type of activity as a meeting ice-breaker at the beginning of the year. It was a great way to get talking in our groups and to make new SBTS feel more comfortable.
Cropping graphics is not difficult either, you just have to understand the cropping tool in graphics programs or you can use the Graphics toolbar features in Microsoft Word.
By adding these components you are not only addressing content but also at the same time, allowing students to practice the thinking process, becoming familiar with thinking vocabulary, and helping them to "see" their thinking about how they reached the conclusions about what types of animals would be seen in those habitats.