Science night was on the 17th, and this year each class was assigned a different theme with each student making a project that fit into it. 5th/6th was "simple" machines, 4th was volcanoes (with explosions every 15 minutes), 3rd grade was the egg drop, 1st grade was bubbles, and 2nd got biomes. All of the models were created in the classroom with materials we had on hand as well as things brought from home. Students also created a poster to go along with their model. Each poster had a hand colored picture of the biome, notes from the reading in a cute little animal book, and a paragraph about that biome. Students also created an imaginary animal to live in their biome and wrote in informational book on it.
The biomes all set out on Friday night.
The Chaparral was made using textured grass paper for the ground. It had a yarn lake, pompom pipe cleaner trees, and pompom bushes. This was perhaps the hardest biome to get started since we didn't have any books on it, and it was hard to nail down exactly what it was at first.
The Prairie had grass paper on the bottom and was covered in cut green yarn grass. The most intricate part of this biome was the animals as the builder said "everything looks weird in the prairie. Just because it's called a prairie dog doesn't mean it's a dog looking dog."
The evergreen rainforest was a very temperamental biome for the kids to make. Its owner started by making over 30 pipe cleaner trees. Some had beads on them and some were wrapped in green pipe cleaners, but none of them would stay up. He tried super glue, hot glue, a staples, but nothing would work. Finally, with 10 minutes to go we poured a good inch of bead pine needles into the bottom of the forest, and that finally managed to keep the trees upright.
The jungle biome was another very intensive biome to construct. This one was really a class effort as everyone pitched in to help make beaded trees, cut fallen leaves, and paint lace green. The trees were so heavy glue was next to pointless, so the builder hung the tree branches from the sides of the container and used those to hold the trees up.
The mountain biome was our first biome started and the first done, thankfully since the builder had to go home sick the last day of construction. It was made out of crumpled brown butcher paper painted gray/white and green. Some parts were also left brown to show exposed dirt and rocks, and a large cave was included for the bears to live in (because you can't forget those when you live in Alaska). The trees were made of brown pipe cleaners wrapped in short green pipe cleaners.
The tundra biome was perhaps the perplexing to the builder because the tundra is constantly changing, and no two pictures looked the same. As a solution he banded it to show different parts of the tundra at different times of the year. To do this he used cotton balls for the snow and grass paper and paint for the variety of colors. He talked with the class about mixing the colors but decided this was truer to the seasons.
I had a lot of startled parents when we unveiled the finished product for this project. For two weeks the kids had been talking about taking notes, doing research, and building models; something a lot of parents didn't know what to make of. The night of the science fair every inch of every project was photographed and discussed in great detail with parents who couldn't quite believe their 2nd grader had created the display in front of them. One grandparent told me while happily snapping away with her camera her daughter hadn't thought it was possible when she'd told her their little one was doing a research project.
