If you read about my last PBL (project based learning) post, you may have been anticipating this one. I absolutely LOVE how our zoo PBL went!
First we read the book called If Anything Ever Goes Wrong at the Zoo by Mary Jean Hendrick.
After that, we had someone come and pretend to be a zoo keeper. He explained that something has gone wrong at the zoo. They had too many animals in the Savannah section and they needed our kindergartners to help research the animals so they could find a new home for them.
Then, we went back to the room and discussed what we needed to learn about the animals. We came up with our questions to research and figured out what Savannah animals were.
I put my students into research groups based on their surveys, and they went to work researching. They used books, websites and videos. I linked to the website and videos with QR codes that they scanned with the iPads.
If you are curious about the job assignments you see in the pictures, click here!
Then, we actually got to go to the zoo to do some field research! Here is where I loved to be… it may surprise you, but I LOVE birds! I have two just like this one!
We came back and got back to finishing our research and developing our products. The students made masks, backgrounds with water colors, and posters. I let the students pick their final products, but they were all intrigued with making a movie on the Flip Camera, so that is what they all picked!
Here are some masks made for the video presentations:
Here are some of the Savannah Backgrounds:
At the end, we presented to the fifth graders, “sent off” our videos to the zoo keeper, watched the video he created for us in response, and had a fun lion craft snack!
To continue the theme throughout our study, we incorporated a graphing math activity, and I created a zoo addition bump game!
This really was a lot of fun! I will post soon with the survey, QR codes, and research notes packet we created to use. If you’d like to check out my zoo addition bump game, you can click here!
