Earth Day Research

Today I'm linking up with Teaching Happily Ever After to share an Earth Day activity that I do. Just because I teach the intermediate grades doesn't mean I don't love to celebrate any and all holidays! In fact, I'm kind of known as the girl that tends to go overboard for classroom celebrations but I think I'm probably amongst bloggyfriends (new word to be coined) when I say that!




First off I want to share a little Earth Day art project. The day before Earth Day, I read a few books such as The Great Kapok Tree and The Lorax. We create a list of words that we will use as part of our door display that embody what Earth Day is all about such as flourish, reduce, endure, together. After school I write each word in cursive on a half sheet of white construction paper-cut lengthwise. The kids pick out a word the next morning and use paint, old buttons, yarn, glitter, straws, clothespins (left over materials from art projects) to decorate the words. Then they cut the words out, getting as close to the letters as possible. The end result is a terrific vocabulary word that resembles a leaf. We post them on our door display which is my classroom door, covered in blue with a big brown tree with branches on it. It is a show stopper! I didn't think to snap a photo of it last year but I will get one on Friday to share with you.

We are currently in the middle of a research unit on notable people in history and we have been reviewing our nonfiction reading skills. I wanted to give my kids extra practice with these skills so I created a computer based reading lesson which uses Worldbook.com as a resource. This is an online encyclopedia that you need to subscribe to. Luckily my district does subscribe to it and I 've come to learn that most schools tend to have some form of online encyclopedia or reference subscription. If you do not but would like to try this activity or something similar to it, you can always count on the Scholastic site for some great ideas and online reading materials. I have my students access Worldbook in our computer lab and then continue on to the Living Green section to complete the nonfiction packet (see below) that I put together. If you don't have access to a computer lab or any online subscriptions, you could always print out your own articles appropriate to your students reading levels and give them a generic notecatcher similar to the one below.

I have included a copy of the mini-lesson and the notecatcher I use with my third graders. It isn't anything fancy or super cute, but I like how open ended it is. It basically differentiates itself.

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children"-Native American Proverb.