A good friend, who did Joy School with us until she moved away last fall, was very good at creating something visual to help the children understand the lessons she presented. I always enjoyed that about her lessons, and as I was preparing myself for my desert day, I tried to come up with ways to be more like that.
Lesson Time: I taught that deserts cover about 1/3 of the entire earth's surface.
Then I taught about what makes a desert and how they are very dry. I used a liquid measuring cup and filled it to the 1 cup mark and showed them that in a desert, only 1 cup of rain falls each year.
We moved on to talk about the adaptations that plants and animals in the desert need to make in order to survive in a hot, dry place. (Yes, I know there are cold deserts, but for time's sake, I focused on hot deserts)
Video Clip: We watched a couple of great videos from our Planet Earth DVDs. The first one was a sandstorm that showed many animals and how they coped with the blowing sand, and also showed how the sandstorms effected the landscape. Very cool.
The next one was about lizards, (I think in Mexico, but I don't remember for sure) that jump to catch the flies in the air. It wasn't as interesting to me, but it was kind of funny to watch, and I thought the kids would like to see it.
Craft Time:
Science Time: I loved this science time! My friend who did the great visuals for her lessons also was very good at coming up with great science experiments, and I have to say that I think she would have approved of this one!
We began by watching another segment of Planet Earth that showed the giant cacti literally expand before your eyes as it absorbed water from a recent rain.
Then we moved up to the kitchen table where I had a pie plate with water in it, and a dry kitchen sponge that I had cut into two cactus shapes. We put the sponges into the water, and sure enough we were able to watch them expand and swell as they absorbed it.
Snack Time:
I made some desert dessert. It was chocolate pudding, and on top I sprinkled some graham cracker crumbs to be the desert sand. This was good, but as the kids ate, they found candies hiding under the sand, just like animals hide under the sand during storms and during the hottest part of the day.
Singing Time:
I had previously made some camel stick puppets and I dug them out to use while we sang 'Alice the Camel.' They were really well received and the kids were swinging and shaking them all over as we sang.
We also sang 'The Animals in the Desert,' which is to the tune of The Wheels on the Bus. We inserted animals we had learned about during our lesson time. So the snake went 'hiss, hiss, hiss,' the kangaroo went 'jump, jump, jump' etc.
Art Time:
To do something a little different, I decided to use chalk as our medium. I gave each child a sheet of black construction paper and we made beautiful desert sunsets.
When they were done their colouring, they used their hands to rub and blend the colours together. So pretty. As a final touch, we glued on a construction paper green cactus on the bottom.
Story Time:
I am often able to find books from our own family's collection to go along with our lessons, but I didn't have anything on deserts. So I went to the library and found these two books:
I always love seeing what you have done for joy school! You have just the best ideas. (I will for sure be using them in the future). I just posted the "arctic" class I did......can't wait to see what else you ladies do with joy school this month.
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