Yesterday we took our first "mini field trip" of the year. As part of our unit on living and nonliving things, I wanted to give the kiddos a chance to see some living things in action, so we went to the park across the street from our school to explore our local environment.
To be honest, I feel like this trip was a little contrived. While I was planning the unit, I wasn't sure whether the kids would actually be excited to observe rocks and air . . . but leave it to firsties to get pumped about the littlest things. As we assigned the teams before we went to the park, the kiddos were cheering for their groups. You would have thought the "Air" group won the lottery! {And that's why I love them.}
Once we were in the park, the kiddos made their observations. We had four observation groups: Air, Rocks, Soil, and Water. Fortunately, it had drizzled earlier in the day so there were puddles for the water group to check out. The air group even got lucky because there was a bit of breeze. They noticed so many things floating around them! The kiddos made scientific drawings of the moss on the rocks, the worms in the soil, the leaves in the water, and the ladybugs in the air. Wow!
Once they had completed their observations, the kiddos sorted the items they'd found into living and nonliving features. My goal was for them to begin to recognize the variety of living and nonliving things around them. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be learning about how organisms interact with their environments, so these observations will also be the starting place for that discussion. Despite the fact that we could see the school over the hedges, and they were observing rocks, the kiddos had a great time! I'm really looking forward to the rest of this unit!
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