Curriculum Work
I have been working in my nephew’s kindergarten class at Garfield Elementary with Teacher Kyla. For my curriculum I chose to do a planting project with the children. I wanted to keep the project within the theme they were currently studying in order to keep things consistent. At first I wanted to create curriculum with trees because that was their theme. I got to thinking and Teacher Kyla allowed me to view their science curriculum and I decided that the transformation of a tree would be a good inclusion to their current projects. Although this sounded like a good idea, I was not able to create something suitable for the age group considering attention span and time limits. I had looked at the requirements for skills and vocabulary that were in the teacher’s manual and decided that bean planting would be a good idea and simple enough to do. They could watch it grow and learn the parts but there was one part missing, the roots. Although we could probably pull up the plants after they had grown to see the roots, I thought the children might have trouble doing something so abrasive to their precious little plants so I got some potatoes to put in water and held up by toothpicks so that children could watch roots grow too. So here it is…
To begin with, I explained the project and materials to the children and related it to what they had already done. I only did the activity with half of the class so that it would not be too chaotic and it seemed to work well. The children each have their tables where they sit and there were four tables total so I started with the first two. I set the materials for each project out but only one project at each table at a time and then switched.
Bean Planting Project
Materials Needed:
Paper or plastic cups (poke holes in the bottom for water drainage)
Organic soil
Beans (I used kidney)
Craft sticks marked with inches
Permanent marker
Small bowl or bucket (for soil)
Tray or loaf pans
Name tags
To prepare for the project, I poked holes in the bottom of the cups. I also marked the craft sticks up to four inches with a permanent marker. I put some soil in a bucket as well. I had examples to show them so they would know what the end product of Day 1 would look like. I also made journals for them that they could use to draw pictures for Day 1, Week 2 and Week 5.
Steps
- Get a cup with holes, two beans, a craft stick.
- Fill the cup with soil
- Poke 1 hole in the center of the soil with a finger
- Put both beans in
- Cover up the beans
- Place measuring stick in the soil until it reaches the bottom line
- Have children write their names on name tag labels
- Put the labels on the cups
- Put the cup the loaf pan
- Water it
- Watch it grow!
Potato Project: 
Materials Needed:
Clear plastic cups
Round toothpicks
Small bowl or bucket (for water)
Name tags
Steps
- Have each child pick a potato
- Let them count out 4 toothpicks and a cup
- Have them put the toothpicks in the potato (close supervision)
- Put the potato in the cup
- Add water to the potato cup
- Have them write their names on the labels
- Put the labels on the cups
After the children were done with their projects, I gave them each a journal to draw the picture of their plants and potatoes on Day 1.
Overall, I believe the project went well. We were a little short on time and some children ended up leaving during the project to go to lunch. I actually felt like it was a little chaotic but the girl working with me said it seemed to go well which made me feel relieved. I liked this project but there are just a couple things I would do differently. The first would be to have a better schedule with the teacher in order to not have children leaving in the middle of the activity. The second would be to have an alternate picture taker. It was hard to be the one explaining, setting up and taking pictures all at the same time. Other than that, the project went really well.
