The dirt on dirt

What we've been doing in science: We started the year learning about dirt.  I thought it would be an awful unit.  I am not very passionate about dirt.  Surprising, right?  This year we do not have a science textbook.  The A Beka textbook about earth science has a sample of their table of contents.  I used this as inspiration for what topics we should study.  The rest I have been coming up with myself, with some help from Google and Pinterest.

I started out with a pretest for the boys to see what they knew about dirt.  They didn't know very much, which made me optimistic that we could only get better.  :)  Here are some of the activities we did while studying soil science.

Apple soil demonstration:  This model did not work super well, since I have a tiny cutting board and the apple peeler does not work the best.  Although I dropped a slice or two on the floor, it did show well the relation of the whole earth and the amount of usable soil we have for farming.  I got this activity from THIS amazing website.  It has lots of creative, engaging ideas for teaching earth science.  

Layers of dirt with food:  The boys love doing anything with food.  I saw several different examples of layers of dirt food things online.  I took those ideas and made it my own.  We used solid cookies at the bottom of the cups to represent bedrock.  Then I used chocolate kisses for parent material.  Pudding represented the subsoil.  Crushed Oreos were used for topsoil filled with gummy worms.  Crushed Chips Ahoy were used for the very top layer.  The following day I had the boys label the layers on a giant cup.  It was a yummy day.

Mason jar soil test:  I had the boys bring some dirt from their yards so we can see if it is "good" dirt.  We did this mason jar soil test.  It was SO cool to see the layers of silt, sand, and clay in the dirt.  We talked about loam and how dirt needs to have the right composition in order to grow plants.

Real world connection: Africa and Haiti are two places in the world who greatly struggle with soil.  Since we live in the Dominican Republic I wanted to make sure they understood the importance of dirt and how we need it to survive.  Without healthy dirt we can't grow food that we need in order to survive.  We also talked about how to make the dirt healthier, like using fertilizer and poop to increase the health of the soil.  Here is the article we read about Haiti.  Here is the article we read about Africa.

Dirt final tic-tac-toe board: I was pretty impressed with my final that I created.  I pulled elements from what we did to create a tic-tac-toe board.  The boys had to pick three in a row to complete.  My favorite were the poems the boys composed.  They did an amazing job writing them!

The second unit that I just finished was about earthquakes and the layers of the earth.  This next week we are starting rocks and minerals.  I love that I am pushing myself more with teaching science.  I think I have been doing a decent job, especially since I never in a million years thought I would be teaching this subject!