First Grade: Oceans

First graders experienced a fun unit about the world's oceans!  We began with a geography lesson and learned about the different ocean layers.  

First graders experience realistic fiction writing in their classrooms, but not fiction/fantasy writing.  We incorporated fiction/fantasy writing into our oceans unit by having students brainstorm and write a mythical sea creature story involving one of the world's oceans.  Students also compared and contrasted their mythical sea creature with an actual living sea creature.  

Here is a highlight of each student's mythical sea creature story.  

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The students learned about how plastic ends up in our oceans and came up with ways that we can prevent this from happening.  

Students learned that robots like rovers are created to explore areas that humans have difficulty getting to on their own.  These robot rovers can collect information about these hard to get to places.  Students programmed the robot rovers to move using a similar programming tool to Scratch Jr (which they learned about during our P.E.T.S. convergent thinking).  


Next year we will have an awesome programming and Lego unit with a theme.  Stay tuned to hear about our next year's adventures!  It was a great first year for us in Idea Lab!  Have a great summer!