Week 17 Day 1

Book choices for today:

A Desert Habitat   Kelly Macaulay
Cactus Desert   Donald Silver
Deserts   Cathryn Sill
The Desert Alphabet Book   Jerry Pallota
Tiny Tortilla   Arlene Williams

Science: (first circle)

Need for lesson – Pictures of desert scenes, a picture of a Saguaro Cactus, and a real cactus plant for the classroom. A painting or coloring work of a desert scene.

Science 38
We have talked about some different biomes. We talked about ponds and the rain forest. Another kind of biome, or habitat is the desert. We’ve seen these desert pictures when we learned about the artist Georia O’Keefe. Remember how much she liked the desert? A desert is a dry, often sandy place. Few plants grow in deserts because there isn’t much rainfall. Deserts have hot dry days, and cool nights. Deserts are home to many living things. Most desert plants have the ability to collect and store water when it does rain. A cactus plant is one kind that can do this. This is a picture of Saguaro Cactus. The stem of the Saguaro Cactus stores all of its water. The stem is green. Remember when we talked about photosynthesis? Photosynthesis for this cactus occurs in the top layer of the stem instead of leaves. This is a real cactus plant that we can put on the Botany shelf. Deserts do not get a lot of rain, and a cactus is a desert plant. Do you think we will be giving this cactus plant a lot of water to take of it it, or a little?
Many animals that live in the desert are nocturnal. Many lizards, snakes, and birds live in deserts. The Desert Lark and Cactus Wren are two kinds of birds often seen in the desert. Can you remember the artist name that lived in New Mexico that liked to paint desert scenes very much? Georgia O’ Keeffe.

Additional Works:

Desert Animals Booklet – This is from enchantedlearning.com.

Desert Words – This is from kidssoup.com. I thought is was a great idea for older children. They can practice writing different words that relate to the desert.

Desert Animal Matching – This is also from kidssoup.com.

Desert Animal Matching – Made with stickers from Dover Publishing

Desert Animals and Plants

Art:

Desert Scenes – I found these pictures for the children to paint and make into a desert scene on the Internet.

Cactus Prints – These are made with a cactus stamp and some paint.

Spanish/Science: (second circle)

Need for lesson – Colors, numbers, and animals in Spanish. Have a review of the colors, numbers and animals. Ask the children how many of something you have in the classroom and they can answer in Spanish. Ask them to tell you the name of one of the animals and the color of it in Spanish.

Additional Work:

Spanish Number Booklets – These are little booklets of numbers 1-10 in Spanish. Children have to count the dots, cut out that piece, and paste it to the number page. It is from The Mailbox Magazine.

Songs/Poems:

EL Gato is ….(from Week 15 day 4)

Another option for second circle is to introduce another animal habitat. A sweet little story about animals in a meadow is, Play with Me. I made it into a Book on the Shelf work choice.