Grade3Plants-Activities-TalkingPlants

=If This Plant Could Talk - What Would It Say?=

This is an activity to test the Grade 3 students' prior-knowledge about the needs of plants and/or how environmental conditions affect plant growth.

Description:
Before talking about the specific needs of plants, the teacher will assess students' current knowledge by having the students complete speech bubbles for sickly, unhealthy plants. The activity can be completed as a class activity and teacher directed or in smaller groups and be more student directed.

Preparations:
Select a variety of locally significant images of sickly, locally significant plants from a site such as: Flickr using the Creative Commons filter. Here is a link to one such search using the tag "wilted"

Here are a few I discovered for Northern Ontario Vegetation:
 * Image || URL ||
 * [[image:http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3486/3292091167_3ce96a9908.jpg]] || http://www.flickr.com/photos/guest_family/3292091167/

CC by "Road Fun" ||
 * [[image:http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3145/3005310280_5bbb8410b1.jpg]] || http://www.flickr.com/photos/headlessness/3005310280/

CC Headlessness ||
 * [[image:http://visualfunhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/dying-plant-optical-illusion.jpg]] || http://visualfunhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/dying-plant-optical-illusion.jpg

image by: visual fun house ||

Either ahead of time, or real-time in front of the students, use a program such as Comic Life or PowerPoint, to add a speech bubble to the selected images. Here are two samples:
 * [[image:bubble1.jpg]] || [[image:bubble2.jpg]] ||
 * Created with Comic Life || Created with PowerPoint ||

Gather the class and show the images. Prompt the students to fill the speech bubble for the plant by saying to the students... If these Plants could talk... what would they say? How do you think they are feeling? What would they be asking for?

Differentiated Learning Ideas

 * A worksheet could be created and handed out to students where they could work in small groups to complete the speech bubbles.
 * Use just a photo of the plant and hand out speech bubbles to the students that they can just put their name on. They would stand up and say out loud what the plant might say (this would not require writing skills). And then place their speech bubble on the photo as an indication that they participated.
 * Students could act out how the plants are feeling and the care they might need.
 * The activity could be done in VoiceThreads where the sickly plants are shown and students' audio is recorded rather than focussing on writing and reading.