We made our own name tags out of mashed up pokeweed berries while the children shared with me what they thought we'd be covering in our class. I shared a picture and the story of how I had collected the berries from the pokeweed growing in my backyard. I explained that pokeweed is a local plant that is toxic to us yet provides food for our songbirds. As the children finished up the tags, I covered our one rule: respect.
Respect will be a major theme in our class. As we explore the fundamentals of ecology and biology through the church grounds, I hope to foster and nurture a sense of awe and respect in the kids for our living world. Respect, however, starts with how we treat each other. I explained that if we raise our hands to speak and not talk over or to each other while someone else is speaking, then we are all being respectful. The kids got it and were quite overjoyed that I only had one rule. :)
We moved onto our core lesson for the day. We covered the information on pages 8 - 12 in Wetland Food Chains by Bobbie Kalman and pages 4 - 12 in Life Processes: Food Chains and Webs by Holly Wallace . The children learned the following terms: photosynthesis, primary producers, primary and secondary consumers, food chain, food web, plant, herbivore, carnivore and omnivore. We discussed the three building blocks of life: sun, water, and air. Air is made up of a lot of gasses so we mainly discussed oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange.
At this point, the kids were ready to MOVE! We would have headed outside for a game of nature detective but the weather was not cooperative. Instead we read The Seed and The Giant Saguaro by Jennifer Ward. Each child took a role in the book and romped after each other in a circle as I read. Their enthusiasm and energy was fantastic! Much to our dismay, we were out of time when the book was finished.
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