Happy Summer! We hope all is well with everyone. We are so excited to blog about some of the fun, thematic activities we did during our last trimester of school.
Right after our water and weather unit, we rolled right into renewable and non-renewable natural resources in social studies. We paired the fiction text of Wump World by Bill Peet with nonfiction resources online to start this unit.
We learned the definition of renewable and non-renewable resources from the Encyclopedia Brittanica site for kids. We took notes on the information, and then organized the notes into a web.
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| The students loved using Kidspiration to create a graphic organizer of their notes on natural resources. |
After this, our kids had a great time connecting what they had learned from our reading of this text, as well as prior nonfiction reading from our water unit to the fiction text of Wump World. The emotions ran deep. They were appalled at what the Pollutians did to to Wump World, and could easily make the connection to what humans are doing to our planet now. They immediately saw that the Pollutians symbolized the humans. It was nice to see them make that connection as well.
With this text, we wanted to give the students a challenge to take the skill of cause and effect to the next level. Instead of providing them with either the cause or the effect, and having them identify the missing element, we had them identify both the cause and the effects in the story. What was great about this, is that they soon realized that one cause could have multiple effects in the story.
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| This student looked through Wump World and found an effect. Then he looked for the cause. |
These are just a few things that we did with this unit. Next week, we will share more…Wump World Part 2.
Kim and Anne
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