Lesson plan
Plant Life Cycle: Pumpkins!
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to describe how a seed grows into a plant after listening to a nonfiction text.
Introduction
(5 minutes)
- Gather your students where they can see you.
- Show students the cover of The Tiny Seed.
- Invite your students to recall or guess what the story may be about.
- Tell your students to pay special attention to how the seed grows into a plant.
Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling
(10 minutes)- Read the story while pausing to note what happens to the tiny seed during each stage of its journey.
- After reading the story, summarize the growing stages of the tiny seed.
- Explain that many plants begin and end in similar ways.
- Explain that a cycle is something that repeats over and over again.
- Explain that a life cycle of a plant is when something begins with a seed, grows into a plant and then makes more seeds.
- Load the How Pumpkins Grow video, or print and use the pdf version to display to your class.
- If time allows, you may want to show the video Peep and the Big Wide World: Peep Plants a Seed.
Guided Practice
(10 minutes)- Hand out the Pumpkin Life Cycle worksheet.
- Tell your students to sit in a circle with the worksheet on the floor in front of them.
- Tell your students that they will be cutting out the pictures and gluing them in the correct order on the worksheet.
- Go around the circle of students to give every student a chance to describe a picture and where it will fall in the pumpkin life cycle.
- Continue this practice by telling your students to point out the pictures from first through last in the cycle.
Independent working time
(10 minutes)- Instruct your students to cut the pictures out and glue them in the correct places.
- Tell your students to lay out all of the pictures first before gluing!
- Dismiss your students to work in their table spots.
- Go to each student as they finish and ask them to describe the parts of the cycle on their worksheet.
Differentiation
- Enrichment: Advanced students who finish early may continue with the Plant Life Cycle worksheet included in this plan.
- Support: Some students may need extra time to complete the assignment. Some students may need visual and verbal clues to help them finish the worksheet.
Assessment
(5 minutes)- During Guided practice: Look for students who are pointing at the correct picture on the worksheet.
- During Independent practice: Your students should be able describe the pictures in the life cycle of a pumpkin.
Review and closing
(5 minutes)- Ask your students to describe what happens to a seed.
- Ask your students to name what needs to happen for a seed to grow.
- Invite your students to name one thing they learned in today’s lesson.
- If time allows load and watch the song That’s How A Pumpkin Grows.
- Compliment your students on their hard work!
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