ORCHIDS UNIT
Instructional Objectives
Science and literacy
Instructional Design (Teaching and Learning Activities)
Scientific
Investigation Activity
Students investigate the life cycle of an orchid plant, the propagation of an orchid plant and the marketing of an orchid plant through research and field work.
Teacher’s
Role
· Introduce orchid plants by displaying different orchid plants and discussing their differences to other house plants and their origin in the wild (one class period)
· Distribute orchid notes and allow students to go over plants using notes to note plant parts, characteristics and reproductive parts (one class period)
· Display past projects as examples, review Internet etiquette, Internet research and basic word-processing skill, and provide brainstorming time (one class period)
· Allow students to work on research on their group activity using provided site list. (one to two class periods)
· Facilitate field studies on virtual tour and actual field trip to the nursery. (field trip - one day, virtual trip - one class period)
· Distribute orchid notes and allow students to go over plants using notes to note plant parts, characteristics and reproductive parts (one class period)
· Facilitate field work and data collection (one class period a month)
· Facilitate rough draft of written project (two to three class periods)
· Facilitate brochure lesson (one to two class periods)
· Facilitate interview/skit lesson (two to three class periods)
· Post Rubrics
· Monitor activities
Student’s
Role
· Collect data from actual field trip (one day)
· Collect data from Internet sites and create a business letter (one to two days)
· Create a brochure on Publisher (one class period to design and one class period to finalize)
· Create a rough draft of written report (one to two class periods)
· Create group skit/interview (two to three class periods)
· Finalize group skit/interview (one class period)
· Present group skit/interview to the class (one to two class periods)
Advance Preparation
The teacher must be able to:
The student must be able to:
Activities
This orchid project is used in an elective class that lasts about 9 weeks and only a part of this class time is used on this project. The unit is comprised of four lessons that integrate field studies, Internet studies and classroom exploration. The business letter rubric is used for the e-mail lesson and the science rubric is used to assess written work.
Lessons