The Lorax’s friends kindergarten 2010-2011

1. The Lorax’s friends kindergarten 2010-2011 Integrating Learning: • Language Arts:The students practiced using their reading strategies as they predicted, clarified, and summarized stories that we read such as The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. The students also practiced their reading and writing skills as they read the communication guide, circle maps, and their written work. • Science: The students learned about environments, living and non-living things, factors that positively and negatively impact environments, the parts of plant and their functions, how to plant seeds, and how to transplant. • Social Studies:The students learned about the negative effects that people have on the environment and what they can do to help. • Arts:The students learned about rip art when they used recycled materials to create an environmental landscape on a piece of paper. • Dance:The students learned a dance called “The Flower Pokey” in which they showed their knowledge about the parts of a plant. by Cecilia Uribe

2. The Lorax’s friends kindergarten 2010-2011 Meeting Genuine Needs: • After reading and discussing TheLorax, we brainstormed about living things in our community that we needed to protect and would like to be a friend to like the Lorax. We brainstormed using the think-pair-share strategy to share our ideas with our partners. Then we shared our ideas with the rest of the class; as the students shared, I recorded and illustrated their ideas on a circle map. • After creating a circle map with ideas such as tress, flowers, birds, air, and ladybugs (just to name a few), each student chose a living thing from our circle map that they would like to protect; the majority of the students chose flowers and trees. by Cecilia Uribe

3. The Lorax’s friends kindergarten 2010-2011 Youth Voice and Choice: • Each student chose something in our community that they would like to help protect (from our circle map), wrote a sentence about it, and drew an illustration showing what they would do. • The majority of the students chose to be a friend and protector to the flowers and trees. Their illustrations showed them planting seeds and watering plants with ladybugs on them. • Since the majority of the students chose to be a friend to trees and flowers, we decided to plant seeds and flowers on the school campus. by Cecilia Uribe