Summer SAVY 2019: Session 2, Day 5 – Animal Adaptations (Rising 1st/2nd)

Posted by hallep on Friday, June 21, 2019 in Grade 1, Grade 2, SAVY.

Animal Adaptations Blog. Friday, June 21

One of the highlights from our last day with each other was to listen to our peers describe how they solved a problem that would help an animal survive due to a missing or injured body part, using both the scientific process and engineering design. Each student chose an animal, either an opossum that was missing a pouch and couldn’t carry its young, or a turtle that was missing one leg. Everyone’s solutions were quite innovative and we applauded their creations. We read two really good books just prior to sharing our innovations. Those books were: How to Heal a Broken Wing, and If Sharks Disappeared… Through these two books, we were to have some really great conversations.

Since we had investigated a lot of different animals this week, we began to see how we could classify them. Our first thoughts lead us to classify by wild and tame as well as land or water. We came up with some very good examples, such as wild/water: whale, tame/land: pet cat. Then we discussed other ways that we could classify animals. This lead us to mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects, and the reasons they can be classified in these groups.

We added to our understanding of our concept of change and then, we read the book, The Great Kapok Tree. After reading this book, we held another Debatable Question forum (Socratic Seminar). This question was: Should people be able to build houses or buildings anywhere they want to? The responses were very well thought out and presented. One student said that she would be okay with people building anyway, as long as it was a treehouse.

During the last part of our day, we used SAVY Chrome Books to get on a free app called Tinkercad, and we tried our hands as engineers who were designing artificial body parts for animals in need. By the way, you can get this at home, and it is free! This has been an incredible week, and I am sad that is has flown by so fast. I look forward to seeing some of the same students in other courses I will be teaching this summer in sessions 4, 5 and 6. Thank you parents for blessing me with the opportunity to get to know your children!

Sincerely,

Karen Tyson