Weekly Activities – Project Based Learning

An Animal's Habitat

Learn how important an appropriate habitat is to the survival of any animal. You will choose and read about a specific animal. You will need to find out where it lives, what it eats, whether it is endangered, and all about its habitat. Then create a diorama of its habitat, or use your artistic ability to draw or paint your animal in its environment, to show others how your animal lives.

Cool Characters

In this project you will learn about characters in stories. You will discover that a character can be a person, animal, or other creature. You will keep notes in a journal as you learn to pick out the characters in stories and to describe them with adjectives. Your final product will challenge you to choose two characters from the same story and write down five adjectives to describe each one. Then you can draw your characters, and add a background to show where they are and what they are doing, or you can turn them into puppets. If you choose to draw your characters, you will have the option of submitting your work for publication in a magazine.

Beautiful Bugs

Learn all about butterflies. You will find out how they are able to migrate such great distances and about their various habitats around the world. Learn what scientists know and also what they do not yet understand about the metamorphosis of the butterfly. After you complete your research, you can create a butterfly handbook or you can challenge others with a board game of questions and answers.

By completing this project you will discover what it was like to live in the colonies during the period from pilgrim days to the Revolutionary War. Through research, you will learn about the challenging and exciting events experienced by colonial kids. You can choose to use your imagination to write a diary as if you were a young person living in the 1600s or 1700s; or you can use your hands to build a diorama showing what a home, schoolhouse, or town might have looked like during these times.

Greeb Thumb Fun

While doing this project, you will become a plant scientist and keep a logbook about the specimens you are studying. First, find seeds common in the area where you live and attempt to identify them. Then plant and care for the seeds to see if your identification was correct — will they grow into the kinds of plants that you expected? Your end product is a talk or a scientific poster to share your findings about seeds and plants as recorded in your logbook.

Animal Adaptation

This project will help you to understand how animal species adapt and change to thrive in their environments. For example, the beaver has adapted so that its front teeth can cut wood that it will use to build a home; the giraffe’s long neck helps it to reach up into tall trees to eat the leaves. After learning about many of these adaptations, you can use your imagination to create a drawing of a make-believe animal, designing it to fit into an environment of your choice; or you can become a scientist, and make a scientific poster showing adaptations of several different animals. Upon completion of your project, you will have the option of entering it in a science fair.

This project will help you to gain a better understanding of freedom in general by specifically examining freedom of speech and expression. You will look closely at the First Amendment in the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights to find out exactly what protection it offers to citizens of the U.S. For a final project you can research protest songs from the past and then write lyrics for one of your own, or you can write your own “I Have a Dream” speech about a change that you would like to see.

Complete this project to learn how cities and societies change. You will choose a city and study its past, so that you can compare this to its present. While researching, keep a notebook about the changes that have taken place in this city over the past 100 years. Find out how such things as transportation, architecture, and the needs of people have changed. Then imagine what this city might become in the future. You can paint or draw your vision, build a three-dimensional  model, or design a city with a computer. You also have the option of entering a future city engineering competition.

In this project you are going to learn about biomes. You will research the climate, location, geography, vegetation, and animals of each of the major biomes of the world. Then discover what happens when the equilibrium of any given biome is disrupted by change. Your product options at the end of this project will be a travel brochure enticing people to visit a chosen biome; a letter to the editor of a selected newspaper about environmental issues facing your chosen biome; or an essay about those environmental issues, to be submitted to a writing contest, school newspaper, or local newspaper.

In the course of this project, you will become familiar with various public policies. You will read about social action at the local, state, and federal governmental levels. Find out how the policy-making process works. Choose a policy that interests you and learn how to research it. You will keep a research log to help you store and organize information. For your final product, you can either write a position paper outlining your policy proposal, or moderate a debate about your policy. If you choose to write the paper, you can submit it for publication or enter it in a writing contest.

Play the role of an anthropologist, a scientific observer of a group and its culture! Look at a few ethnographies. Then select a group in your community and go “out in the field” to study elements of its culture. For a final product, you can write an ethnography or create the storyboard for a movie.

Learn about disease epidemics that have affected the world and how epidemiologists continue to study these outbreaks to this day. You can also learn about current epidemics and about those that might occur in the future. For your final project you can make a scientific poster showing how the threat of current flu strains compares to those of previous strains, or you can write and deliver a brief speech about an infectious disease that you believe deserves greater attention. If you choose to make a poster, you may want to use it as a beginning for a science fair project.