Throughout my unit on plants, students were encouraged to engage in critical thinking. We had a class garden outside the classroom and bi-weekly we went out into the garden to discuss our observations, what we predict will happen and whether this prediction occurred, and to better understand the life cycle of plants. I provided many opportunities for them to make inferences and develop reasoning for why they think a particular phenomenon was seen in the garden (ie. Holes in the leaves) and make future predictions about how the garden will look the next time they come to observe. The students kept plant observation journals where they wrote about what they observed in the garden, any questions they have, and any future predictions. I provided them with sentence frames such as “I observed,” “I wonder,” “I predict,” “I noticed,” and “I think” to give them some ideas of what they could include and develop. The students made great connections to what they saw occurring in the garden and what we were learning in our regular science lessons, such as what they thought particular bugs were doing in the garden, what stage the plants were in, and what they think would happen next. Accompanying the garden, students were also learning about the plant life cycle, parts of the plant and their functions, and what plants need. I made use to provide multimodal ways of presenting this information and allowing students to create their own inferences from stories, videos, songs, and embodied learning done in class. I also found that having the garden provided a physical representation of their curriculum information and helped students to better visualize what they were learning to deepen their understanding and encourage critical thinking connected to all the different modes of information that they had been presented.
When learning about stems I did a science experiment for the class to better visualize this part’s function. I put celery (which we learned was a stem from a book we read prior to this lesson) in coloured water and regular water. The students discussed and made predictions about what they thought would happen next class, using what we learned about stem’s function. The students then wrote down and drew their predictions and why they thought this would occur. The next day we observed the stems and whether our predictions were correct. The students then wrote down their observations, again using what they had learned in class about stems and leaves.
Also, when learning about different insects in the garden, we engaged in embodied learning and imagined ourselves as various insects such as bees, butterflies, worms, caterpillars, and snails. Then we continued this perspective and wrote in first person pretending we were one of these insects after brainstorming on the board some facts we know about these insects from stories read in class (both fiction and non-fiction). Students then wrote info-fiction stories in their writing journals that combined facts learned from stories and their own elements of fiction that they envisioned to create a diary entry as this insect. The students loved the diary entries and once I tried to add an alternate perspective and had them write as a teacher teaching somebody all they knew about a particular insect. While the students still had a lot to say, I found that this activity was not as open-ended nor did they encouraged as much critical and creative thinking as the diary entries did.