The Endangered Project (Day One)

After reading the Youth Edition of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, my 8th grade classes are about to embark on a multi-tiered project:

• research endangered edible plants, fruits, and vegetables
• choose one of the endangered species and tell its story through essay, poetry, infographic, podcasting, art, and research
• as a class, we will choose some of these plants and order their seeds if accessible
• as a class, we will plant them in my room
• mature plants will be taken to our homes and planted in our gardens
• some plants will be donated to our school's vegetable garden
• our projects will be contributed to a library seed bank
• the intention is to document the success of our plants through Google+ throughout the spring and summer, even when school is not in session

Today, we spent ten minutes freely exploring endangered plants. With iPads and Chromebooks, students started to search for them. Directed to chase ideas, words, pictures that they found interesting, we began to uncover some common themes.

Some of the more general reasons (that we discovered today) why plants are endangered are climate change and disappearing habitats. 

On Day 2, we will model the task I will turn over to them on Day 3. We will be searching for everything we can find as group about one specific plant and entering it into a worksheet I created on Google Docs.




Day Two       Day Three