Lunchbox unit
Level: Years 2-3
School: Rosebank School
Teacher: Tamzin Nelson
Category: Teaching strategy
Rosebank School's commitment to implementing the Technology curriculum throughout the school resulted in a very successful Year 2-3 unit – Lunchboxes. This proved a great introduction to Technology for the junior students and their interest was such that they followed up some areas of inquiry in more depth than their teacher had envisaged.
Second-year teacher Tamzin Nelson had attended a two-day workshop on unit planning, where she designed Lunchboxes (.pdf, 46kb), an integrated unit with a major focus on Technology and minor foci on Science, Health and English, to fit with a school-wide theme of recycling rubbish. Tamzin notes that she was concerned about maintaining the integrity of Technology and the other areas as discrete subjects and although she usually referred to the unit as a Technology one, she made a point of telling her students "Okay, today we're doing Technology (or Science/Health/English)".
As Technology was new to the students and some of the staff, Tamzin planned the unit around all three Components from the Technological Practice strand so that everyone would become familiar with the technological process. She also included Technological Modelling and Characteristics of Technological Outcomes from the Technological Knowledge and Nature of Technology strands.
Tamzin says she wanted the unit to be simple enough that her young students could cope and any relieving teacher could "just pick it up and run with it". English is the second language for a large proportion of the school's students and Tamzin's students were also very young, so she incorporated a lot of discussion, rather than written work, into the unit. She designed a work booklet (.pdf, 603kb) which incorporated writing frames so that students only needed to write their responses to questions.
Tamzin shared the unit plan, booklet and interactive whiteboard slides with her colleagues and, together with Year 2/3 teachers Mary-Rose Ballard and Kathy Scott, taught the unit in mid 2010. The unit plan was flexible enough that each teacher could follow up particular areas of interest. The three of them trialled the removal of rubbish bins from classrooms, keeping bins for scrap paper only so that students had to take their lunch rubbish home.
This led neatly into the unit, which started with students walking around the school and looking at the kind of rubbish that had been dropped. They discussed what they had seen and looked at some short video clips on recycling, then categorised the rubbish as to whether or not the material could be recycled. After a discussion on materials which are eco-friendly or bad for the environment, the students placed samples on a 'good to bad' scale in terms of their environmental impact.
Following this activity, the students took rubbish from their lunchboxes and buried it in the garden by their classroom. Each student predicted what they thought would happen to the different types of rubbish, for example, 'I predict that the plastic was bad because it won't go anywhere'. They found, after digging up the samples seven weeks later, that the paper and apple cores had disappeared but the plastic bottle hadn't changed at all. This led to a class discussion about rubbish dumps and which materials are good for the environment.
At this stage, Tamzin introduced her students to the concept of material properties by getting them to look at and describe the packaging used for their lunches. She gave them a starter sentence to help them understand how to describe the materials – 'Plastic in my lunchbox is used to wrap my sandwiches. It is smooth and soft so it easily goes around my sandwiches'. The students used the BBC interactive website Bitesize which teaches the properties of different materials, and Tamzin comments that again she was amazed at how much the students learnt, and how they also brought their own knowledge to the class discussion on properties. She had first gone through the site and explained some of the concepts, such as 'compare and contrast', and the meanings of words, such as transparent, so that the students could concentrate on understanding the properties.
The students looked at what they brought in their lunchboxes and asked their parents what they had taken to school – with 15 different nationalities in the classroom this provided an interesting and engaging lesson for them. They followed this up by considering the difference in food packaged at home and pre-packaged food, considering how they might use less packaging if buying, for example, a big package of chippies and putting it into reusable zip-lock bags.
One of the students asked why his lunchbox was marked with a number 5 so Tamzin explained about recycling plastics and showed the class a website about all the different plastic types. The students were so interested that they looked at the properties of different plastic types and, after the first student concluded that the Number 5 was on his lunchbox because it was hard, decided that all their plastic lunchboxes must be made from 'number 5' plastic for this reason. "I was astounded that they were interested in the different types of plastic", says Tamzin, "but it was their own inquiry so I ran with it".
The students looked at pictures of different kinds of lunchboxes and put them on a time-line according to whether they were old or new. Tamzin says they were fascinated by metal lunchboxes and the resultant discussion on why lunchboxes are made from plastic rather than metal nowadays produced some good answers – 'If a metal lunch box gets a hole in it, the lunch will get wet', 'if I drop it the metal will bend and squash my lunch', 'Because there aren't any compartments my lunch would get squashed', 'Plastic is nice and light and waterproof, and a little bit flexible so it won't bend when I drop it'.
Having identified the parts of a lunch box, the students designed their own, modelling them through drawings – and many incorporated the recycling number 5! Partners swapped drawings and marked them according to the success criteria they had been given, such as having separate compartments and a lock.
The unit plan suggested further activities teachers could do with their classes, and Tamzin notes that flexibility was one of the strengths of the unit, allowing teachers to follow their students' interests rather than a prescribed plan. She decided that although the students could have gone further and modelled their lunchboxes in cardboard, she preferred moving on to something else and followed a discussion on healthy eating with a sandwich-making session (run with parent help) in which the students selected from a variety of healthy ingredients and made their own sandwiches.
With the rubbish bin gone, the scrap paper bin was quite full so Tamzin and Mary-Rose worked together on papermaking and every student produced their own sheet of handmade paper. Kathy's class also created their own paper during the unit. Mary-Rose's students, too, had extended their work on the unit and her class had followed up uncovering the buried rubbish with learning about composting materials.
The Lunchbox unit achieved far more than Tamzin and her colleagues had expected – "it was a very rich unit – it involved a lot more learning than I imagined. The quality of the learning was quite advanced and involved a lot of student inquiry." The unit also facilitated a home-school partnership and Tamzin reports that parents were amazed their children could discuss things such as the properties of different plastics.
Tamzin would use the unit again with a Year 2-3 class and notes that it could well be used in Year 1 in a school where students mostly speak English as a first language. She would again teach the basic unit and follow student curiosity, as with the recycling plastics topic, wherever it might lead. "They might ask about dead fish in the sea and perhaps we'd go down the resources/waterways pathway. I'm happy to follow lots of different topics."
When considering any changes she would make to the unit, Tamzin comments that as an advocate for using correct terminology in the classroom she thinks she should have done more – "I could have said 'we're going to look at technological knowledge today' or pointed out what part of the Technology curriculum we were actually looking at, because as students move up through the school they're going to have to come across that language anyway, so why not introduce it now?".
She adds that next time she would make the technological process more obvious – "maybe have a display, such as 'we found a need; now we're going to address that need' and focus on Technological Practice. Our work probably seemed, to them, more of a natural progression –'we've found out about this and now we're going to do this with it' – whereas I could have been more explicit about tech practice."
Student work also featured on Tamzin's classroom blog, which she set up after attending a CORE ulearn conference in October 2010. Her students write about what they have been learning at school and Tamzin encouraged their parents to read the blog and leave comments (the few students without access to a home computer use a classroom one).
Tamzin's advice to anybody feeling nervous about starting Technology with junior students is that it doesn't have to be a big or complicated unit, and doesn't need to involve lots of writing. "Class discussion can lead to a lot of student learning, and instead of writing students can use images. We found, after doing the unit, that teaching Technology wasn't difficult".
When the Lunchbox unit was published on Techlink as an example of an integrated unit, its simplicity appealed to other teachers wanting to start Technology with younger students. Twyford School in Hastings, for example, contacted Tamzin and planned to adapt and use it with the whole junior school.
The success of the Lunchbox unit also led to a school-wide change of format in unit planning – integrated units are now presented with the different learning areas highlighted beside each activity, and an asterisk showing where "you could take this further in science by....".
See also the Techlink Resource Review Bitesize.
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