What a great morning I had with Mrs. Atkinson’s 2nd graders! These students have recently started studying ecosystems and Mrs. Atkinson wanted her students to spend some time researching a specific habitat and then design and create a replica of their ecosystem. Mrs. Hues (Elementary ITRT) recently shared a post on her blog about a lesson that she helped with at Longan! Students spent time researching a habitat using Encyclopedia Britannica. We followed suit.
I often forget about some of the great resources that HCPS provides for our elementary students. Today we started our lesson by accessing OneSearch and launching the online encyclopedia. Just like Mrs. Hues shared in her blog post Britannica is set up to be quite user-friendly. Students launched the program, clicked on Animal Kingdom and then switched one tab so that the animals were sorted by Habitat. Britannica also has a great read aloud feature for those students who need more support with reading the text. As the students researched they filled in a graphic organizer created by Firsties are Fantastic. Students were able to watch video clips, look at images and read short articles filled with facts about their ecosystem!
After spending about thirty minutes researching important facts, words that describe this habitat and the animals that live there we opened Pixie and the students spent time creating a replica of their habitat! Students were encouraged to use the paint brush, spray cans and even sticker tools in Pixie. Mrs. Atkinson and I were slightly nervous since we basically gave them a blank canvas to start with but check out some of their amazing ecosystems!
