Plants

‘Plants’ is a CLIL unit aimed at the first and second grades of Primary Education.

The goals I want my students to achieve are divided into two groups:

Science goals:

• Describe the main characteristics of a plant.
• Recognize and label the parts of a plant.
• Name some common plants and trees from our environment.
• Say what a plant needs to grow.
• Find out about seeds.
• Distinguish between flowered and non-flowered plants.
• Analyse and recognize the different stages in the plant life cycle.
• Tell the difference between bushes, trees and grass.
• Find out about vegetables.

Linguistic goals:

• Understand and produce vocabulary related to plants: names of plants and trees, parts of the plant, …
• Write words and vocabulary in the second language.
• Sing a song in English.
• Listen and understand important information.
• Connectors: first, then, next, finally.
• Talk in English about plants.
• Read short sentences related to the unit.

I have developed a Notebook file for the digital whiteboard that acts as the guiding thread of the whole unit. There are different types of pages in this file, some to teach vocabulary with pictures, some to practice the contents by doing different exercises, some to elicit oral interaction, some with animations and interactive games, … You can see how the file works in the video below and if you like it you are free to download it for your lessons.

Notebook plants

Download

One of the proposed goals deals with the parts of a plant, in order to teach them I work with the following video song that it’s quite catchy and helpful (my students love it).

Parts of a plant

Apart from the multimedia resources already seen here, students also do some worksheets to practice individual writing skills, those worksheets are a way to check their knowledge and to give me feedback about the lesson plan.

A practical activity I put into practice to make students see the life cycle of a plant was “growing a bean plant”. We inserted three beans with cotton in three transparent glasses and we watered them from time to time, there were different conditions in each of the glasses (different levels of water, different position according to the sun, …) and during some weeks we drew the different stages of the plants and finally we analysed why one grew before the others and what the differences were among them.

An excellent book we read in the classroom when talking about seeds and plant stages is ‘The tiny seed by Eric Carle’. Apart from being very useful for teaching Science it’s also great to use in Art because of the so good and colourful illustrations.

Last but not least, I prepared a Wordle with all the things the students knew of plants at the end of the unit.

Wordle