88. Seed Games for 1st and 4th Graders This Fall

For first grade, the next generation science standard that I pulled was 1-LS1-1.

Use materials to design a solution to a human problem by mimicking how plants and or animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs.

This standard is all about mimicry, and when people talk about mimicry, burdock seeds inspiring Velcro is one of the most widely used examples.

We're going to start to ease your learners into Burdock and Velcro by giving them exposure to different seeds, how they move, and where they can be found by making a clue-inspired board game.

Although this game does require more prep than I typically suggest, it will be a lot of fun and can help your learners become more familiar with the unique adaptations that seeds have to move from their parent plant to a space with more resources.

So to prepare this game, you'll want to create a game board with a grid.

You could do this by creating a table in PowerPoint on the largest paper size you have available, or drawing out a grid on poster board, or getting super fancy and having a grid printed on an actual game board using a service such as the Game Crafter.

which I can link in the show notes.

And this can be as basic or as professional looking as you'd like.

Either way, your learners are going to have a blast and learn something new about seeds.

Once you have your grid, you're going to include different ecosystems like the rooms from Clue.

You could print and paste pictures of a meadow, a coniferous or evergreen forest, a deciduous or hardwood forest, and a wetland in the four corners of your board game.

If you don't have these ecosystems near you or you have more prominent ecosystems than these, consider selecting more place-based options than the ones that I've suggested.

By having fewer locations to visit than the actual Clue game, it will help move the game along quicker than a traditional version, plus it's easier for first graders to navigate a more simplistic board and list of possibilities.

As a starting spot in the middle of your board, you could print out a picture of a seed and place it there.

If you choose to make your grid on a poster board, you could print and paste the pictures onto your poster board.

Just make sure that you're cutting the picture to fit your grid squares so that you're not cutting off any of the squares your learners would be moving over.

If you choose to print the board game on paper, you can just overlay the pictures on your PowerPoint file and same thing for your board game if you get it printed professionally.

Once your board is all set up, you can move on to making the cards.

You're going to use the pictures of the four ecosystems as cards, again, similar to the rooms in Clue.

Then you'll want to create cards that represent seed dispersal techniques, like the weapons in Clue.

Some ideas include wind, hitchhiking, floating on water, animal caching, animal waste, gravity, propulsion, and heat activation.

You'll also want to include some sort of visual representation of each of these things whether that be clip art or some form of photograph.

Lastly, you'll want to create the suspects or in this version, actual seeds that could be found near you that move using one of these techniques into one of these ecosystems.