Nutrition: Grades K-4
Sat, Dec 01, 2012 1:27 AM
Life Sciences review on Organisms
This science guide on life science is a great resource for the elementary classroom. This guide has provided me with math graphs and vocabulary to help me with integrating language arts and math curriculum into the science curriculum. The Science Guide Map is very resourceful to plan well in advance a map for a quarter or semester. What I truly enjoyed in reviewing this science guide were the web links that allowed me to a plethora of information. You can easily spend many hours developing your plan.
The guide map provides starting points for your lessons. In a displayed treemap, the science guide is broken down in three themed areas: community, ecosystems, and environment. By clicking any of these themed curriculum, a general focus can be developed by browsing through this specific site as it is linked to another site. These links can send you to websites for national geographic, university, pbs.org, educational, science links, etc. Some lessons are provided with support of videos, worksheets, activities. The lessons are well detailed for any teacher to pick up and do with preparation.
The science guides has helped me with my lessons with life science for the 4th grade. I was able to make science more interesting with learning about the cell structures between an animal and plant. This activity helped open a segway into the life cycles of animals, food chains, food webs and the effects it has on the environment. I’m using questions generated from the science guides and have changed my lesson multiple times to integrate other new information from the website.
My favorite of this science guide that I found very useful in the classroom has been the ecosystem themes. I thought that this would help in my lessons which are currently on life science. Learning about food chains and food webs. With the help of the website, I was able to make photo copies of the various animals from different systems: land, ocean, air. Students would need to take a photo copy and form a food chain by moving themselves in the correct order. If a student could not find a spot, the class would discuss the possibilities. Some students were able to discover that omnivores were more versatile in the food chain making themselves more important.
The ideas that I got were from reading many of the lessons. The ecosystem had many great ideas to choose from and hands on activities for kids.