I am currently obsessed with trees. When I started teaching about plants in second grade, I was flabbergasted by how many of my students couldn't name any of the trees on our playground except for the pines -- and we live in foresty Vermont!
 |
| Looking for seeds on our school trail system |
Last year I did a tree video project with my class using the Adobe Voice iPad app (now called Adobe Spark). In pairs, the kids chose a tree on the playground to photograph, used books in the classroom to identify it, and made a video describing its leaves, bark, and seeds. Three days into the project, one boy came to me very distressed that he couldn't find any "helicopter seeds" around his maple tree. "All there is is acorns," he complained. I investigated, and sure enough, there were no helicopter seeds and many, many acorns . . . because his tree was really an oak.
 |
| With Voice/Spark, we could take pictures of our trees right in the app, then add captions and voiceovers. |
As we move toward Project Based Learning in our district, I am planning to focus my first project around trees. We have a trail system that connects all of the schools in our district, and my class is going to create a field guide or series of signs to teach hikers about the different species of trees on our trails. At least, that's my current vision . . . there are absolutely NO field guides designed for emergent or early fluent readers, so we're going to have to get creative and do a lot of hands on and visual explorations to learn about how to identify trees.
 |
| Rough, grayish-brown bark, dry sticks left behind where old branches have fallen off. Any guesses what kinds of trees we have here? |
In the meantime, I'm taking lots rambles in the woods, reading lots of field guides, and trying not to drive my family crazy talking about "alternate composite" or "simple lobed" leaves all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment