Objective:
Child will be able to develop models of living things and their needs to live using SOHO Bricks as a modeling aid.
Essential Question(s):
What do living things need to survive?
Where do they live and why?
How do they use natural resources?
Special Materials:
Pen/pencil and paper, markers or colored pencils; cards with living things’ names
Bricks Required:
All
Project Structure
Engage:
- Provide child with a piece of paper, markers and a pencil for drawing.
- Provide child with a card (at random) with a living thing’s name.
- Ask child to draw a picture of the living thing and its home (natural environment), including things they would need to live.
- Provide child with facilitating questions to support their art:
- What does your living thing need to eat to live?
- Does the living thing have a special home?
- What do you imagine would be in the living thing’s home?
Explore/Explain:
- Provide SOHO Bricks to build their living thing and its home.
- Provide child the opportunity to write about their living thing:
- What is it?
- What does it need to live?
- What does its home look like and why?
- It is okay at this time if child is not sure what living things are or what they need to live, or to know much about their natural environment.
Explain/Elaborate
- Provide child with a piece of paper, markers and a pencil for drawing.
- Provide child a new living thing card at random.
- Have child draw the living thing and its home.
- Child can then use SOHO Bricks to build the living thing and its home.
- Ask child to write a few sentences about their living thing and its home.
- Identify the living thing.
- Where does it live and why does it live there?
- Child explains their model.
- If desired, go a step further and have child identify living things that work together or support one another in an ecosystem.
- Have child connect living things that have similar needs or that support one another (i.e food chains/webs).
- Child can construct ecosystems and explore living and nonliving things’ relations within their natural habitat.
- i.e. plants need sun, water, air to live—bees need the air from plants, warmth from the sun, water and flower nectar and pollen from plants to live.