LESSON PLAN TEMPLATE Your Name: Aviva Lavey Title of Lesson: Why is Organic Important and Sustainable?

Grade: 5th 5-ESS3-1. STANDARDS Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect the Earths resources and environment.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. LESSON SUMMARY/OVERVIEW This lesson gives students the information about how organic and conventional farming affects the environment. They will learn about the 5 key components to sustainable farming and reflect on how the world would be damaged if we do not become more sustainable through a creative writing assignment to explore what the Earth would look like if we do not change how and what we eat. OBJECTIVES 1) Students will be able to write a narrative about the negative impacts of conventional farming. ASSESSMENT/EVALUATION 1) Write a narrative that uses facts learned to create a story about conventional farming impacts. PREREQUISITE KNOWLEDGE The students will need to have an understanding of what the various components of organic and non-organic farming are. They will have to know what organic and conventional. All of this information will be taught throughout the first 3 days, prior to assessment. In order to see what they already know, there will be class discussions starting on day 1 to see what they know or think they know. The class discussions will be conducted throughout the first 3 days of the lesson. MATERIALS Sustainable crops print out, pencil, paper, whiteboard. VOCABULARY/KEY WORDS Organic, conventional, components, sustainable, water quality, biodiversity, renewable, conservation, economy, environment, pesticides, run-off, multi-cropping, fertilizer, crop rotation. TEACHING PROCEDURES Procedural Steps (Step by step instructions for teaching the lesson): Begin by having the students get into groups and share the facts that they had learned from the homework assigned from yesterdays plans. They should all have at least 3 interesting facts. Next come together as a class and using any means that you find most suitable to your class, discuss the negative effects of conventional farming has on soil, water, and over all lack of sustainability. Explain that although they may provide more food, the food is full of chemicals that destroy the planet and our health. If wanted, hand out the article found in the resources section of this lesson plan. You may also choose to just summarize, although the article is very student friendly. Have the students circle or underline what they think is the most important information and most interesting to them for their narrative later. Once the discussion is done, have them write their narratives about how the conventional farming is harmful and why organic is more sustainable and over-all better for the health of the world and the human body. RESOURCES
Sustainable Crop Production. (n.d.).GRACE Communications Foundation. Retrieved November 20, 2013, from http://www.sustainabletable.org/249/sustainable-crop-production

WAYS OF THINKING CONNECTION This lesson exemplifies futures thinking as well as values thinking. Futures thinking is anticipating how the systems we use today will impact the future of the Earth and find the unexpected consequences of our solutions to problems today. Values thinking looks at how the values we hold affect the decisions we make in our daily lives, from recycling to energy conservation, to whether organic is important enough to pay attention to. This lesson has these two types of thinking by getting students thinking about how they value not only the Earth, but their own bodies as well. Seeing as organic farming is proven to not be as harming to the environment as well as the human body, it gets them thinking about what they value more, their health and

environment, or eating poorly because it tastes better such as fast food. Organic is not necessarily more expensive if you know how to shop, and they can influence their families to have similar thinking. Also the narrative that the students will write at the end of todays lesson is a good example of futures thinking because they have to write about what the future would look like if we continue with conventional, non-sustainable farming. This will get them to conceptualize what the world will look like if we ran out of water, or crops, or healthy usable land. They will see how it is impacting the future in the long run and how important it is to change our ways now for future generations.