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