More Habitat Resources

As promised...here I am!  Back and posting again. 

   In second grade we've finished up our habitat unit.  The kids were divided into groups (learning partnerships) to become an "expert" on their assigned habitat.    We began by researching our habitats on the school's laptops.  We are blessed at our school to have a mobile lab.  The lab has 30 or so dell touch screen laptops.  

     Enchanted learning is an excellent website to use for habitat research.   Check out their website at http://www.enchantedlearning.com/biomes.    I quickly show the kids how to navigate the website and they really take off on it. 
     You can see the form the kids use for their research in the picture above.  You can access it at this link:
Habitat Research Form



  
   After researching via the web, I give the kids a day to research the old fashion way.  Yep we still use books in my classroom.  :)


    On day three & four the groups work together to color and add animals to habitats that I drew out.  My document camera came in very handy as I projected a worksheet to trace the backgrounds.  
These are really poster sized.  They look smaller in the pictures.  

     Next comes time to turn our research into paragraph form.  At this point in the year my babies aren't ready to write paragraphs...or at least what I consider a paragraph.  So I created a fill in the blank sort of deal for the kids to create their paragraphs.


Habitat Paragraph Form 



After editing their paragraphs, they were rewritten.  The last day of our unit was spent drawing the researched habitat and painting it with water color.  Here are a few examples.  I realize they are not perfect.  The point is the kids worked hard, they learned a ton, and were super proud of their accomplishment.  

 Hmm...that may be flying elephants?

 And that's it...habitats according to Mrs. Jones.