Spiders - Lesson 7: Now We Know Spiders!
On this page
- Encountering the Idea
- Exploring the Idea
- Getting the Idea
- Organizing the Idea
- Closure and Assessment
- List of Activities for this Lesson
BIG IDEAS:Knowing about spiders helps us appreciate them.
Information helps us make guesses.
Whole Group Work
Materials
- Book: Anansi the Spider by G. McDermott
Read Anansi the Spider to the students. Discuss how spiders are remarkable. Ask
students to name different things that make spiders remarkable. List key words on
a poster strip for use at the Writing Center.
Lead the discussion so as to refer to the graphs students constructed at the
beginning of the unit. Take a survey at this time. Put the new data on a poster
board showing the way students feel about spiders now that they have completed
the unit. Use the information in the Organizing the Idea phase of the lesson.
At the Science Center, the students pretend they are spiders catching flies and
participate in Activity - Catch a Fly.
At the Mathematics Center:
- Students construct new sets of students liking or not liking spiders by
referring to the new graph constructed at the beginning of the lesson. Students
list the students in each set and count the members of each set. They identify
the set that has more, or fewer, members. The students say which number is
greater and why.
- Students complete Activity - Spider Probability!
At the Writing Center:
- Students write individual cinquains on spiders and glue or staple them on
the body of the paper-plate spiders they constructed earlier in the Art Center;
display work on the wall.
- Students design and make a minibook, in cartoon style, showing a sequence
of a spider building a web.
Students read the cinquains they wrote at the Writing Center. They discuss the
ideas in the cinquains among themselves, comparing and contrasting their feelings
about spiders.
Ask students if they think that knowing about something helps them develop better
opinions about that thing. For example, when they first gave their opinions about
spiders, did they know that spiders will not bite or attack unless they have no
escape? What else did they learn about spiders that influenced their opinions?
Make a list of things the students did not know about spiders. What do they know
about spiders now? Explain that after learning new things about spiders people
may still not like them, but now they have reasons for liking them or
not liking them.
Construct a third graph to see if students have changed their opinions on liking
or not liking spiders. Record their opinions again. The responses should include
reasons for changing their opinions based on facts about spiders. Compare the
feelings and opinions between the first two graphs and the third graph.
- Students identify special characteristics of spiders through
comparing/contrasting in Spider Characteristics sentences. They complete frame
sentences such as:
A ____________________ is ____________________
A ____________________ is ____________________
A ____________________ is not ____________________
- Assess degree of completion of cinquain and the number of ideas expressed
in it.
- Assess degree of completion of minibook and the correct sequencing of the
steps in building a spiderweb.
Spider Probability!
|
