This year is my first year teaching science so I was a little nervous about what to do. When I think about science, I think hands-on, active, creative projects. But when I learned that our units included the water cycle, rotation/revolution, and the moon, what could I do that would not be too high level for second graders?! Lo and behold, the Internet provides excellent resources for teachers to modify to fit their students' needs. Through my searches, I found some wonderful blogs of other teachers who had innovative ideas which I implemented immediately into my lessons. These projects allowed students to manipulative objects, discover, and create, but most importantly, students understood the concepts in a deeper manner.
The Water Cycle
One of the first units that we worked on was the water cycle. During this unit, I found a project from the "Simply Second Grade" blog by Mrs. Lyons. On this blog, there are pictures of example projects from her students and the cutest poem to go along with the entire unit. Even though we completed these projects over a month ago, the students still remember the song and hand movements that go along with it and love to do them at random. Click HERE to access this great blog!
Rotation/ Revolution
Rotation and revolution were difficult concepts for my students to grasp. Not only do both words sound similar, but they could not remember which celestial bodies rotate and which ones make a revolution. Also, the amount of time it takes for the Earth to make a rotation or for the moon to make a revolution could not be remembered. For this unit, I found the blog "Tori's Teacher Tips" which created a project involving brads. This enables the Sun, Earth, and Moon to rotate as well as make a revolution around each other. I combined this project with the a poem which includes the amounts of time that each take to rotate or make a revolution. When students manipulated their project as well as read the poem, the entire concept clicked. Please click HERE to access this great blog!
The Phases of the Moon
Finally, our most recent unit included information about the moon and its phases. The project that I found for this was from the blog "Just for Teachers: Sharing Across Borders". I modified this project a lot to include a large sheet of construction paper. The blog shared the poem that I had the students read and paste onto their project. Being that this assignment was completed after we read and researched about the moon, having the students cut and color the various phases helped them to actualize what was happening in the sky throughout the month. Click HERE to visit this creative and inspiring blog.
Each of the projects allowed my students to become more engaged in the unit we were studying, understand the concepts fully, and allowed them to utilize their creativity. I love how my class took their time in developing them; it shows because the projects turned out AMAZING!
I would love to learn about other science projects that inspired creativity and exploration in your classroom! Please feel free to share in the comments section below.
Enjoy!
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