This section of our site is written for 6,7,8
year old children. Uncle Eric has a garden. There is
nothing strange or unusual in it. It's just an ordinary garden. Children often take
the simple things for granted. They do not look closely.
What's that? You may ask. They may reply that it's a bird,
but they haven't an idea of what kind .... so we've a section on simple
bird identification.
To put over the idea of looking at things closely, we've
designed an activity where they can look very closely ...
using a scanning electron microscope. Ordinary things look
very different.
Down at the bottom of the garden there is a wood. Children
need to realise that woods and gardens don't just sit there and look pretty ... they are
active and the creatures who live there are inter-related. Here we introduce the idea of predator - prey relationships.
Then for a bit of fun, there's a do it yourself garden
making kit. Here you can drag and drop the components and make your
own version of the garden. You CAN print these out by right clicking on a WHITE
area of the screen and using the print command from the menu.
Observing a garden can produce a great deal of data. We've used the bird data to make a simple table. Children can
use their graphing and language skills to present this data in different ways.
Enchanted Learning contains a real wealth of black line
pictures ... most labelled ... for getting to grips with the anatomical
terminology,
Then finally, there's the opportunity to visit the Scanning
Electron Microscope in Hawaii. Some wonderful pictures there ... you can also zoom in and
out for 'real'!!
So perhaps after visiting Uncle Eric's garden and its
associated wood, the children will have learned to look a little more closely at the
'ordinary' things around them.
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