I’ve tinkered with this so much over the years it is ridiculous! This year, I tried a very different approach and I think I love it. Not so darn complicated and the kids get to use their knowledge more in creative ways.
It all starts with making sure they really understand the resources they will need to work with! This involves an extensive plant study, which I always love. My school has easy access to the forest (very handy, but not totally necessary). I’ve created some study resources that worked perfectly for my 3/4 split, but will keep older grades happy too. Here they are:
Local Plants (a powerpoint of local plants…great for practice and review)
Local Plant information (wrote this myself in kid-friendly, annotated fashion, although got all of my information from Plants of Coastal British Columbia (Pojar and MacKinnon, 1994)
drawings of local plants (my drawings…a bit rough, but useful)
Local Plant Sorting Activity (for the kids to work through) and Local plant sorting sheet with answers (at least for the name-drawing matches).
I also have a powerpoint for the game and a sheet that each group will get. They need to earn points through trivia in order to use the resources to create products for trading.
I’ll explain more about how the game works in another post soon.
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