After exploring their group's soil with all of their senses, students write and present group poems to express their observations and impressions. This is a grade 3 Life Lab Science, core curriculum lesson. This lesson integrates well with other curricular areas such as Language Arts.
Students investigate and then describe properties of soil.
In this activity, however, they are asked to observe it as if they are encountering it for the first time. As they explore soil with their senses, students are scientists examining the physical properties of matter. As they describe these properties in their own words, they become poets creating an expanded meaning of soil for themselves. As both scientists and poets, students learn the value of keen observation and the challenge of describing an object in a vivid way. All forms of matter have properties that can be described by using one or more senses.