Photosynthesis Craftivity

Photo-what-the-sis? Photosynthesis! I LOVE teaching science, especially when I can break it down into hands-on activities that really showcase these big scientific concepts in simple ways.

I am excited to share my newest bulletin board and product with you guys!

I switch off every month teaching our content block. Our first month in school, I taught Social Studies and we focused on geography and California regions. This month we are full speed ahead into Life Science. It amazes me how much kids love science. I always look for ways to make it interesting and hands on. Our first chapter talked about photosynthesis. The kids had a lot of background knowledge from learning about plant structure and growing bean sprouts in 1st grade. The text book had very little information about this important process, so I supplemented with a few of my favorite online resources: Study Jams, Brain Pop and Gooru! We did several CLOSE reads to reinforce the content vocabulary.

To test their understanding of photosynthesis we made a visual representation of it as a science craft. I don’t know about your upper graders but mine still love crafts and coloring. It engages them and helps them focus.

I copied a leaf stencil pattern on green paper for each student. They cut it out and traced it onto a piece of green construction paper.

Then, they glued the bottom half of the construction paper leaf on top of the green paper leaf pattern.

They folded back the top part of the lead that was not glue down and drew the leaf’s veins.

I passed out the inside of the leaf diagram and they colored and cut out the pieces. While they colored and cut, I passed out the stems that I cut from the remaining pieces of construction paper.

I asked them to think about where each piece should go on the diagram. They got a lot of the pieces correct and we talked about why each piece needed to go a specific place. I asked them guided questions to further their thinking as well as posed mistakes to have them correct my thinking.

The next day, they had to explain the process in writing. This is such a struggle for my students because not only is it expository writing but it includes a explaining a process with difficult vocabulary and my class is full of second language learners. To make the process easier, I had them explain it in the form of a recipe…. The Recipe for Photosynthesis.

They really wrestled with this task. Having the sentence stems made the task not so daunting for them because the sentence stems helped them frame their thoughts and be more focused. However, after I saw their final products, I realized that they needed even more support- so I created a word bank for them.

I was so proud of my students because they were able to explain their craftivitiy and hearing them use the difficult science lingo was music to my ears.

You can grab my Photosynthesis Craftivity{CLOSE Read & Writing} here, on sale

this week. Next week, food chains, webs and then ecosystems! Off to plan and create! I’d love to hear how you teach these!