Contact Daphne at growinggardenhabitats@gmail.com
My work with and for teachers...
I work with teachers to develop plant-based lessons aligned with state science standards. Plants are an excellent way to study ecosystem relationships between abiotic and biotic features. As an educator, I use hands-on instructional practices whenever possible to bring to life natural phenomena. I can design lessons/units of study for your students and schoolyard. I work with teachers collaboratively to design lessons or can be contracted to do it independently with minimal requirements from teachers. Here are some of my lesson plans designed for Pre-K to 4th grade classrooms.
Contact me for these free lesson plans.
Contact me for these free lesson plans.
Lesson Plans
- Sensory Observations allows PreK students to compare different sensory observations in the classroom, playground, and a garden/woods. Students explore a man-made vs. natural setting using their senses, to observe living and nonliving things, and begin to look beyond “a wall of green” to see individual plant parts and learn their functions. Students will use observational skills—touch, hearing, sight and smell to notice different parts of a natural setting.
- Plants Growing is a lesson for Kindergarten students. The goals are to (1) introduce or reinforce plant parts and functions, and (2) help students recognize that plants grow and change over time. It is often difficult for children to recognize that plants move as they grow because it happens so slowly they cannot directly see the movement. The video in this lesson will help children to actually see plants growing.
- In Comparing Animal and Plant Needs students develop collages to represent (i.e., model) how animals and plants meet their needs in a forest habitat (or other habitats that you may have studied—ocean, pond, prairie, or arctic).
- The Experimenting with Plant Growing Conditions lesson provides grade 3 students the opportunity to observe how plants respond to different growing conditions—ones that are optimal and ones that are not. The inherited characteristics of a plant determine the optimal growing conditions or range of conditions a plant can tolerate. However, changes in environmental conditions can render a plant unhealthy or dead. By providing children the opportunity to observe what happens to the same species of plant, they can use their observations to construct an argument about why the plants they observed did not do so well in various conditions.
- In Seeing Plants Grow lesson plan students visualize the plant life cycle. It is difficult to understand how plants move through their life cycle because it happens so slowly it cannot be directly observed in real time. The use of time-lapsed videos will help students to literally see plants growing and how they move from one stage to another in their life cycle. This lesson is appropriate for grades 3 or 4.
- Experimenting with Seeds lesson has students directly observe seed sprouting and the growth of the first set of leaves for different types of plants over a number of weeks. This lesson is appropriate for grades 3 or 4.
Contact Daphne at growinggardenhabitats@gmail.com
