Week 3-Life Cycles Project Lesson Plan

Life Cycles Project Lesson Plan

Earlier in the school year prior to this Life Cycles project being assigned, students will have been taught and had experience using the following technology tools:

Garageband in the following ways:

Retellings of narrative (HM) and expository text
Reading aloud HM stories for fluency practice
Reading of student writing

iPhoto (drawings will be completed, scanned as a JPG, and saved in iPhoto), in the following ways:

illustrating retellings
illustrating writing

The Life Cycles project is a culminating 2nd grade life science content-technology project to be assigned in the last month of the school year.

After teaching the 2nd grade life science standards using FOSS curriculum, students will write a Step-Up To Writing paragraph about the complete life cycle of an insect or animal. One way we will scaffold this project is by allowing our proficient readers to do research on an insect or animal that wasn't learned about during the Life Cycle unit, whereas our less than proficient readers can choose one of the insects or animals that they learned about during the science unit. There will be a writing rubric the students will be given prior to writing.

Once students have completed their final copy paragraph, they will use it as the script for the audio portion of their Life Cycle iMovie. They will record the audio in Garageband.

Students will also draw colored pictures depicting each stage of the life cycle to be viewed as frames in the final iMovie. These pictures will be scanned by the teacher and put onto the teacher’s webpage for students to access through the internet and download into iPhoto on the laptop computer they are working on.

Then, students will be taught how to use iMovie to create a final Life Cycle movie using the audio they did in Garageband and the pictures they downloaded into iPhoto. They will be shown how to create a title page and how to add transitions also. They will be given a movie rubric prior to making their movie. Once the movies are complete, they will be published to their teacher’s website.

Finally, students will work in pairs to use the student-friendly movie rubric to evaluate and give feedback on 2 Life Cycle movies created by 2nd grade students from a different class.

Project Duration

This project will take approximately 2 weeks, with students working on it throughout ten 40-50 minute periods. These periods will be broken down as follows:

Writing/pictures: 3-4 periods
Audio reading on Garageband: 1-2 periods
Movie production: 2-3 periods
Peer Feedback: 1 period

Week 2 Project Status

So far, Loni and I have finalized the standards, content and ISTE, our project will cover, we've begun discussing our year-long technology use plan, and Loni has created and refined the teacher rubric that will be used for the technology portion of the project. A student-friendly rubric still needs to be created, along with a rubric for the writing portion of the project.

The 2nd Grade California Content Standards this Life Cycles project will cover are:

ELA: Writing Strategies 1.1 and 1.4, Writing Conventions 1.6, and Listening and Speaking 1.5, 1.6, 1.9, and 2.2.
[Students will be reading expository text (Science text and other resources) prior to and during the project to learn about the life cycles of different insects and animals, but reading will not be the only source that will provide the background learning necessary for students to competently write about a chosen life cycle for this project. Students will acquire knowledge about life cycles from hands-on science activities, videos, read alouds, etc. also. Therefore, the reading content standards are not explicitly required to complete this project proficiently.]

Science: Life Sciences 2.b and Investigation and Experimentation 4.d

Having looked over the ISTE Standards and the Performance Indicators for Students Grades PK-2, this project covers all the ISTE Standards for 2nd Grade students.

We will be teaching the students to use the following technology tools for this project: the internet, Garageband, iPhoto, and iMovie HD.

The final project will be a student created movie using iMovie HD about the life cycle of either a specific insect or animal. The students will narrate their written life cycle paragraph script using Garageband and use images that depict each stage of the life cycle. These images will be a combination of pictures made by the the student and photographs acquired via the internet and then saved to iPhoto. Each movie will be made with students working in pairs and will include two different life cycles as a result. The final movies will be posted to their teacher's website for sharing with and viewing by others.

Project-Based Lesson: Intro: 6/22/08

Loni and I have received the okay to collaborate on this project. We chose to do this project together based on the ultra-collaborative nature of our team-teaching, double-classroom situation and on how our 2nd grade team plans and teaches collaboratively. This project will be used across 2nd grade at Kingswood Elem. School during the 2008-2009 school year.

To begin, Loni and I have decided to use and improve a culminating science Lifecycles project we taught this past school year. We want to use a "backwards design" approach by determining what standards, both content and ISTE, we want to base the final assessment on, and then create rubrics, both teacher and peer, to use for the assessment. We also want this project to integrate smoothly with the newly-adopted FOSS 2nd grade Life Science Unit: Insects & Plants which we will teach prior to assigning this project.

We will utilize portions of the project from this past year that apply to the newly created criteria and were successful, and abandon the portions that are not standards-based or were problematic for a large, culminating technology project. For example, the majority of 2nd grade students had no previous experience with the several different software products that were used in this past year's Lifecycles project. This meant we had to teach the students how to use 3-4 different kinds of software over just a few days as they were working on the project. For many students, it was too much varied information/instruction in a short period of time which led to a lot of repetition of procedural instructions and teacher troubleshooting.

We feel this could be improved by creating a yearlong technology plan where students have had experience learning and using at least 2-3 of the software products earlier in the school year before the end of year Lifecycles project.