Plants and Animals badge

Plants and Animals badge (PA)

Beyond You: Learn About Our Environment (BY4)

We used two sessions to complete the Plants and Animals badge: A trip to the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park and then finished up at our meeting. (BY4#4)

Animals:

I contacted Shubenacadie Wildlife Park. They put on lots of different sessions, but none really fit what we wanted but they were great to work with and I sent them our badge requirements and they created a program to suit our needs!

Raccoon footprint

We arrive and started learning about how animals and plants are classified. She introduced the concept of  kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Then we looked at their shell collection and determined if they were bivalves (clams, oysters), or gastropods (snails). (PA#8)

We chose to include a craft with our session, so we made Plaster of Paris footprints. They had lots of different footprints to choose from: skunk, raccoon, deer, etc.

Next we went on a tour of the park. Sue was great and gave us lots of great info. It was a cool day, so we got to see animals moving around and being active that you don't necessarily see when you go to the park on a hot summer's day! They each had a clipboard and wrote down the Latin names of the animals we saw. (PA#6)

After our tour, we went back to the learning center and did a few more activities. She set up four hula hoops labelled AIR, FOREST, DESERT, WATER and a bin of stuffed animals that they had to place in the environment that they lived. The girls loved doing this and was such a great activity! They even turned the hula hoops into Venn diagrams (Owls live in the air and the forest!) (PA#5)

It was a 3-hour session and the girls learned lots and had a great time.

For girls who couldn't go to the Wildlife Park, we created a worksheet for them to complete and home. (Animals worksheet, Word Doc)

PLANTS
6:30-7:00 Patrol Time: I created a fun worksheet to learn about all of the things that can be made from plants! (Plant puzzle, Word Doc) (PA#1)

7:00-7:15 Horseshoe We discussed what we learned on the worksheet.

7:15-8:00 Plant people/chia pets
Supplies: plastic cups, pantyhose, soil, googly eyes, grass seed, spray bottle

The girls put grass seed into the toe of the pantyhose and then filled with soil and tied a knot in the pantyhose. Put the panythose into the plastic cup with the knot side down. Glue on googly eyes, draw on a mouth, and then mist water onto the top to wet the seeds. The grass will grow and create and hair! (PA#2)

8:00-8:15  Plant nourishment--This takes pre-prep. Around lunch time (or you can do it the night before), I put a pice of celery into water with red food colouring, another into a glass with blue food colouring, and a third piece of celery I split halfway up and put one side into the red water and one side into the blue water. The result was pretty cool--the leaves on the split one were red and blue! We talked about how the celery veins pulled the water up to feed the leaves, and that's how plants drink water from the soil.

8:15-8:30 Clean-up and closing