Natural Science Lessons for KS1We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. This costs the purchaser nothing extra. In this way I can continue to provide free resources. Thank you for your support. |
I love mushroom season. I have fond memories of holidays spent in our caravan, situated in woodland, near the south coast. Each year, my mother and I would go into the woodland to gather mushrooms. We would take them back to the caravan and spend the afternoon sitting at the table with our paints and art pads. I have had a soft spot for them ever since!
Simple childhood activities can have far reaching effects in children's lives. Who knows where your lesson about mushrooms today will go next? Mushrooms are fascinating to study with children
YEAR 1
Pupils should be taught to: identify and name a variety of common wild and garden plants... YEAR 2 Pupils should: identify and name a variety of plants in their habitats, including microhabitats, describe how animals obtain their food from plants and other animals, using the idea of a simple food chain, and identify and name different sources of food. (National Curriculum for Science)
Mushrooms break the rules, as it were of plants, by not having any green parts. As such, children find them to be strange and often damage them in their ignorance. Added to which, teachers often think they are too complicated and dangerous to teach children about them.
Correctly handled (literally as well as metaphorically!) you can use mushrooms to extend your children's knowledge of plants, and in autumn they are certianly in plentiful spply and your children will be sure to see them and wonder about them. A lack of green parts means that they cannot make their own food. They feed instead off other things, like rotting wood. In this way they 'clean up' our world. They eat the decaying matter. In this way, children can be introduced simply to the concept of food chains. They do not have flowers either. But they can still reproduce and do so means of spores. Mushrooms come in many different forms: those with gills, those without, those with stems and those (bracket fungi) without as well as with many different variation in size and shape. Do teach your children not to touch them as they can be very poisonous, but do teach them to respect them and appreciate them. Teaching natural science in KS1
As with all nature study, such lessons can not be taught in one lesson and then ticked off as done. You may have satisfied the inspectors with this approach, but you will not have taught the children much. Nature study is an ongoing process involving visiting and revisiting subjects over and over again during the course of a year, following the changes of the seasons. Properly taught, it enriches children's lives and teaches them to live more in harmony with the natural world of which they are a part.
Without effort on your part, it will also give them an undertsnding of the intricacies of the natural world, so wonderful in design and too amazing to be tampered with indiscriminately. This is how science used to be taught, when teachers understood best how children learn - before our target-driven, tick-boxing curriculum came in. The school that score highly with inspectors in the teaching of science still manage to do this - it is quite possible. In fact I am convinced that this is the way that the writer of our curriculum intended it to be taught. However, it has sadly been interpreted into meaningless lessons, coldly given in a desperate effort to 'cover the curricuulm'. Teaching science properly at KS1 means an understanding of the subject of the natural world so that you can take advantage of every opportunity to draw the children's attention to what they observe. Teachers rarely have time to acrue such knowledge - so that is why KS1 Nature exists! I am sure that as you study these amazing plants together, you will learn much! Go on a mushroom hunt
PLAN:
On your own, locate an area where you will be certain to find mushrooms, preferably near to the school so that a quick class outing can be made on foot. If you are fortunate, you might take advantage of a mushroom appearing in your playground. Such events provide wonderful opportunities and the learning from these times will stick much longer than otherwise. Try and identify the mushrooms you find before the lesson. a good ID book is invaulable for this.
THE LESSON: You could start by reading our easy-reader book about some children who go on a mushroom hunt. It is available for FREE download from TES.
Then GO!
Take:
Look for mushrooms. Don't just look for fully devleoped ones.
Mushrooms change as they grow just like we do.
If your mushroom is in the playground, do try and visit it more than once so that you can take note of changes over time. How long does it last? Does anything eat it? In the case of Shaggy Ink Caps, they melt after a few days - looking like 'ink'. For teacher's information - they can be used as ink!
Back in class...
Mushrooms do not keep well, so this should ideally be the same day.
The teacher should hold each mushroom and encourage the children to look carefully, modelling to the children how to ask questions.
Make spore prints
Mushrooms can be indentified by their spore prints.
Follow the instructions in our short video to find out how. Our video can also be used to wrap up the lesson to reinforce knowledge. Sketch the mushrooms
This is harder to do with real specimens for safety's sake, so I suggest using pictures from books. Make sure the pictures are clear and large. In the past, drawing specimens was a time-honoured way to learn to observe carefully, as well as being a way to record what had been seen. Now we have cameras we have got lazy: we get super pictures at the click of a button, but we have lost the opportunity to learn to observe and are the poorer for it.
Encourage the children to sketch the mushrooms. Always reward signs of observation over ability to draw. "Well, done, you noticed the shape of the cap!" Painting lessons could centre around mixing the right shade of colour for a mushroom. Use our mushroom worksheets
Recording extensively for science lessons can kill children's interest in them. However, the best way to extend learning is to carry it accross into the English lesson, where studying non-fictions texts about mushrooms can lead to writing and comprehension work in a more natural way.
KS1 Nature have made available a range of differentiated resources to support lessons about mushrooms for a range of abilities in KS1 - with a FREE Power Point about mushrooms that can be used to start your lesson, or wrap it up, or in between! 29 pages.
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Welcome Hello, I am Lilibette (B.Ed Hons Early Years, Studies in the Environment Specialism Course), here to encourage the next generation to love the natural world, and thereby learn the necessary skills and knowledge to look after it in the years ahead. Read more... Categories
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