Lesson Plan by: Nick Smith
Lesson 7: Habitat Point of View
Age/Grade Intended: 3rd grade
Length:
Academic Standards:
Science:
3.4.1 Demonstrate that a great variety of living things can be sorted into groups in many ways using various features, such as how they look, where they live, and how they act, to decide which things belong to which group.
Language Arts:
3.5.5 Write for different purposes and to a specific audience or person.
Performance Objectives:
1. Upon completion of this writing exercise, students will have written a story from the point of view of an animal living in their habitat with all sentences capitalized and with correct end punctuation.
2. Upon completion of this writing assignment and presentations, students will be able to sort five presenters' animals in the right habitat with all correct.
3. Upon completion of the assignment, students will define habitat and write one way that a habitat and community are the same.
Assessment: Students will turn in their writing.
Advanced Preparation: (1) Make assignment sheet and rubric. (2) Write example
Procedure:
Introduction/Motivation: Today we are going to continue with our unit. Would you believe that animals also have their own communities? (Show pictures with different habitats) Animal communities have a special name called habitat. (Write on the board) There are many types of habitats where many different animals live. Today we are going to talk about these and write about them.
Step-by-step plan:
1. Do introduction and motivation.
2. Teach POV. Explain that this is when you write as if you were the person telling the story. Give examples. Talk about how diaries are a good example of this.
3. INTRO Assignment: Today we are going use our new term POV in our writing. As we talked earlier last trimester animals live in all kinds of habitats. Today you are going to be an animal and write about your habitat as if you are living in it. You are going to describe yourself and your habitat without telling us what animal you are and what habitat you live in. After we have written I will call on five of you to share and we will try to guess what animal and habitat you wrote about.
4. Show example
Wrap up the lesson: Summarize those topics discussed and ask assessment questions. Today we talked about a new word habitat. Who can tell me what that is?
Closure: We have talked about many things. Let's answer some questions.
1. What is one example of a habitat and one animal that lives in a habitat? (Bloom: Comprehension)
2. How are a habitat and community the same? (Bloom: Analysis)
3. What is POV and how can we use it in our writing? (Bloom: Comprehension and Analysis)
Adaptations and Enrichment:
Adaptations:
1. For students unable to write or type, have them dictate into a recorder for teacher to type/write later.
2. If students are able to express themselves in pictures have them draw and write key words.
Enrichment: Draw a habitat of your choice other than the one you did in class.
Reflection: Students will get to use their imaginations with this assignment. It is important for kids as they get older to still have opportunities to do this/
FOR NEXT CLASS: Think about these questions: What is a culture? What things make up a culture? How is a culture a part of a community?
6+1 Trait Writing Model : Narrative from a character's point of view (Rubistar)CATEGORY / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1
Support for Topic (Content) / Relevant, telling, quality details give the reader important information that goes beyond the obvious or predictable. / Supporting details and information are relevant, but one key issue or portion of the storyline is unsupported. / Supporting details and information are relevant, but several key issues or portions of the storyline are unsupported. / Supporting details and information are typically unclear or not related to the topic.
Transitions (Organization) / A variety of thoughtful transitions are used. They clearly show how ideas are connected. / Transitions clearly show how ideas are connected, but there is little variety. / Some transitions work well; but connections between other ideas are fuzzy. / The transitions between ideas are unclear or nonexistent.
Sentence Structure (Sentence Fluency) / All sentences are well-constructed with varied structure. / Most sentences are well-constructed with varied structure. / Most sentences are well-constructed but have a similar structure. / Sentences lack structure and appear incomplete or rambling.
Penmanship (Conventions) / Paper is neatly written with no distracting corrections. / Paper is neatly written with 1 or 2 distracting corrections (e.g., dark cross-outs; bumpy white-out, words written over). / The writing is generally readable, but the reader has to exert quite a bit of effort to figure out some of the words. / Many words are unreadable OR there are several distracting corrections.
Habitat Point of View (POV) Paper
As you know, we studied animal habitats in science, community in social studies and point of view in language arts. Today we are going to write a short paragraph using all three of these things.
Task: Your task today is to write a paragraph describing an animal of your choice and the habitat it lives in. Your goal is to write it as if you are the animal living in the habitat. Do not tell us the animals that are in your story. Use context clues in your writing to help us guess the correct animals. Be sure to include the things you see, things you do and other animals you interact with. Although animals do not really talk, you may have them talking in your paragraph if you wish. See below for my example. You should follow this example when you write yours, although it will be different. You may not just copy mine. Yours does not have to be this long. Your grade will be based on the rubric provided.
My example:
One a bright sunny day, I travelled around in a habitat with lots of trees so I can hide from the hunters who like to hunt me for my antlers. Soon my stomach started rumbling because I was hungry, so I decided to look for some tasty tree bark and berries. Just as I began looking, I heard some leaves rustling, so I galloped as fast as I could, because I thought it may be a hunter. It turned out to be a smelly friend of mine. I plugged my nose because she smelled so bad. Even though she was smelly, I did say "Hello Mrs. ______." I asked my friend for some help trying to escape the hunters. She said "I will be glad to help you. Let's go see my friend who is big and grizzly." The two of them were off to find Mr. ______. Soon they found him looking for some sweet honey. Mrs. Bear asked their her Mr. ______"Will you help us? Hunters are after Mr. ______. Soon Mr. ______said "I can help because I am big and grizzly. I can use my loud growl to scare the hunters away." Soon the three of them went on a walk when they saw hunters looking right at them. It was then that Mr. ______stood up on his back legs and gave out a loud grizzly growl. This loud growl scared the hunters away. After the hunters zoomed away, smelly Mrs. ______, and grizzly Mr. ______were happy to have helped Mr. ______keep his antlers. At dusk, Mr. ______said "It's almost time for me to hibernate." Then Mrs. ______said "I should have sprayed those hunters so they would smell bad. That would have taught them an important lesson." At the end of the day Mr. _____ said "Thank you. You helped me save my antlers." Then they all went back to their houses for the night.