Do you have students who have limited experiences to draw from when they are learning something new? Most of my students don’t have the needed background knowledge to easily learn new material. Here are 2 ways we made concepts in the polar unit come to life for my kiddos.
Most of my students have been exposed to many different animals over the years. What they don’t understand is how those animals compare to them. To help give them a better sense of comparison, we made polar bear paw prints and placed our foot print on top of them. For this part, students had to request the needed materials to assemble the polar bear paw while talking about and labeling the parts of the paw (toes, claws, etc.). We got to sneak in some extra math as they counted out the toes and claws. Finally, students predicted who would have the bigger foot- the polar bear or the students. Guess what…. none of them thought their foot would be smaller!
