Objective of the Project
Students to understand the flora and fauna environment in the school and to identify the plant and animal life around them.
Background
Our nature friendly school campus maintains vegetable garden, lush green lawn, flowers which makes butterflies, garden insects etc the integral part of it. We chose this project thoughtfully for the children to get literacy and numeracy elements through experiential learning.
How did we go about it?
Teacher divided the students into several small groups. Teacher in each group was the recorder. Teacher took the students outside on the “Discovery Fridays” and have them look into all the plants of various size and shape. Teacher recorded the observation of children and listed all the plants, leaves, flowers and insects observed with the plant. Teacher used google lens to find out the name of plant species and made a mention along with other recordings.
Children collected samples of leaves and flowers and placed the collected specimens within the newspaper pages. Teacher helped the students to stack the newspapers into one pile and placed books on top of the top piece to flatten them. After about a week, they took the specimens out. They also collected the dead insects from the ground and kept it in bottles.
Children sow seeds and planted saplings during this project period. They saw the sapling growing and bearing fruits. They harvested the yield. For parental engagement, children took tomato sapling home and took care of it with their parents. Few engaged parents sent picture of the sapling of tomato plant bearing fruit in their balconies and backyard gardens. The educators did the picture documentation of the activities. Children had a session on gardening tools including lawn mower.
Preparation of Project Report
The dried leaves, flower and insect samples were taped into the project sheet. The pages were labelled. Children who learnt how to write alphabets were given the responsibility of writing the letters of words by tracing. They prepared the project report under the guidance of educators.
Aim Plus
We also had the theme of animals. During the theme activity, children with teachers while learning about animals, prepared a zoo project with craft.
The Big Day – Culmination Day
Parents were invited to the school campus. Children conducted the parents through the project they did and the craft zoo. Parents were excited to see, how the little ones were able to explain what they experienced in their own words. That was completely a child led activity.
Outcome
The amount of learning happened during this three and a half month of project was amazing. Each and every domain of development was addressed during this period through this experiential learning session. To name few – the fine motor skills, collaboration, art experience, communication, critical thinking, curiosity, vocabulary building, competency building, craft and the list goes on. The most important of all is the eco consciousness developed in the children and knowing importance of co-existing with plant and animal life around us.
Here's a short clip from our day!
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