Concept Week #14: Life Cycles

This Concept Week was super easy, however the boys loved it so I have no complaints. Actually, Optimus Prime picked out this unit. I was at www.education.com trying to figure out what we wanted to do when he saw a sheet where you glue pictures of frog eggs, tadpoles, and adults into the correct order. He wanted to do it so I spent the day printing up a TON of sheets. They had coloring sheets as well as gluing sheets. They covered plants (corn, pumpkin, etc.), animals (reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals - including humans), and bugs (lots and lots and LOTS of bugs!).

Like I said, some sheets were for coloring, some were for gluing, and there was some overlap in them (grasshoppers and butterflies, for example, had a coloring and a gluing page). It covered how life starts as an egg (either inside a mammal or laid somewhere) then turns to a hatched (or birthed) baby, which ultimately grows into an adult who has more babies.

Was it a very basic concept for second graders? Yes. I think even for first graders (though that was the heading I found the sheets under). But they enjoyed it, even if it was easy, and they were excited to learn some of the interesting facts that went along with some of the pages. We had never really covered the idea of death before in our schoolwork - beyond talking about mummies - so we got to go over that a bit too. Eventually the mommies & daddies stop having babies, and as the babies grow the mommies & daddies age and begin to die. This happens sooner in the world of bugs than animals, but it still happens. We also talked about how some animals (and pretty much all bugs to the best of my knowledge) lay their eggs and leave. They don't stick around to raise the babies like mammals (especially people) do.

So, we got to cover a few different themes with this unit.

We did not have a project. I really couldn't think of an appropriate one to do, and they had so many cutting and gluing pages to do that I felt like we really didn't need one.

On the flip side we did have two books to go with this unit. I was fairly certain we had a Magic School Bus book that covered life cycles, but I couldn't find it. I did, however, find two other Magic School Bus books that covered the topic. The Magic School Bus Goes Upstream: A Book About the Salmon Migration and The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow. The first one obviously covers the salmon migration. But, in case you don't know, the salmon go upstream to lay their eggs then they leave them. The eggs hatch and the babies find their way home. The second one covers plants going from seed to plant to seed again. We had already read the second one for our kindergarten Concept Week on gardening, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

So there we go, our first 2nd grade Concept Week!