Plants: The Living World Around Us - Photosynthesis, Adaptation & the Environment

Graduate Project / Stanford, CA / Winter 2011

This is a service project designed in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences aimed to engage 5th graders in scientific inquiry. In this two-week unit, designed to accompany a visit to the Academy, students will explore concepts of photosynthesis, plant adaptation, and plants’ role in the environment. The unit is structured not only to have students learn scientific principles, but to have them actively engage in the process of scientific-inquiry. Students will keep journals of their investigations and continuously reflect on and refine their ideas.

Each lesson builds up to the final project, where students work in small groups to create a brochure for the Cal Academy’s Living Roof exhibit. While the content of the brochure will be science based, the project is interdisciplinary, involving reading comprehension, note-taking, writing skills, and art. It is our hope that the experience will leave students with a greater appreciation for the natural world, a deeper understanding of the connectedness of all species, and a broad scientific literacy foundation. (Created in collaboration with Jamie Diy & Angela Pan Wong).

Click to download Complete Curriculum (44 pages).

View Sample Curriculum:

design process

My role in the project involved developing the learning goals, defining the enduring understandings and outcomes, outlining the curriculum ideologies and rationale, structuring the unit, planning and writing lessons 4 and 5 according to California State Standards, creating the rubric, and producing the final product. Through working closely with the educators at the Academy and conducting extensive research on learning theories and state standards, we iterated the design of our curriculum to achieve these goals:

• Students will understand the integral role plants play in maintaining and shaping the environment.
• Students will understand the unique adaptive nature of plants.
• Students will understand the role native plant species play in maintaining sustainable green spaces.
• Students will be able to conduct scientific inquiries through the process of data collection and making inferences based on evidence.

A main concern of the curricular design was to bridge students’ experiences across the various learning situations. To address this, we’ve created a project-based curriculum that will tie together the different experiences for students through the collaborative practice of working towards a cumulative end product. We believe that by working together and engaging in the active creative process, students have the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning and bring in their own personal understandings and prior knowledge to the activity. Also, having a final product not only offers tangible work for both teachers and the museum to utilize as part of their evaluation, but allows learners to share with their families and the larger community the fruits of their labor, providing connections and relevance beyond the classroom.