Finding Learning in Little Things

Just recently my student teacher gave our class a little cactus she brought back from a trip to Arizona.  I was excited to receive a plant for our classroom and began brainstorming all the learning we could tie into this small gift that brought such excitement.  Starting with the care directions, my students began to review what living things need and we had lots of discussion around new science words including :  temperature and measurement.  We read about our cactus, interpreted what we learned and then wrote a guide to remind each other about how to care for it.  Using interactive writing, we all dug into word work and practiced stretching through sounds in words, practicing high frequency words, digraphs, noticing short vowel patterns, compound words and the list goes on. One student added illustrations to the steps we composed during play. And, a few students have written about the cactus on the blog, sharing their thoughts about the new plant on our windowsill.  I love it when something so small can conjure up so much learning.