Grade 2: Cycles of Life

• Learn to identify the signs of spring
• Hands-on experience with seed, insect, and bird lifecycles
• Pre & Post-Visit classroom activities available as links below!! For more about the tour’s theme and its relationship to state standards see below.

Tour Theme and Teaching Points

Both animals and plants have life cycles that include birth/germination, growth, reproduction, and death, and plants and animals interact during different stages of their life cycles.

Cognitive Teaching Points. Students will understand that:

1. The Arboretum is an outdoor museum where you can observe life cycles of both plants and animals.
2. A life cycle is when plants and animals change throughout their lives.
3. Plants have life cycles with distinct stages: germination from a seed, growth into a plant, reproduction through pollination and fertilization, and dispersal of seeds to form the next generation of plants.
4. Wildlife and plants interact in their life cycles.
5. The life cycles of wildlife are alike and different to those of plants.

California Department of Education Curriculum Standards

The School Program tours at the UC Davis Arboretum are designed to be relevant to particular California State Standards for 2 nd Grade Life Sciences:

Plants and animals have predictable life cycles.

As a basis for understanding this concept:

• Students know that organisms reproduce offspring of their own kind and that the offspring resemble their parents and one another.
• Students know light, gravity, touch, or environmental stress can affect the germination, growth, and development of plants.
• Students know flowers and fruits are associated with reproduction in plants.

Connecting to the Classroom

To help you and your students make the most of your UC Davis Arboretum visit, the UC Davis Arboretum, the UC Davis School of Education, and the UC Davis Public Service Research Program have created pre- and post-visit activities to compliment our theme based tour.

These activities are designed to correlate with the grade-specific tours of the UC Davis Arboretum, and with the California Department of Education Curriculum Standards.

The Pre-Visit activities will help prepare your students for the material covered by the naturalists on the tour, and the Post-Visit activities will help the students deepen their understanding of concepts as well as let you assess their learning. You may download the specific activities that interest you, or download the entire Second Grade Teacher’s Packet

Pre-Visit Activities, Second Grade

To prepare for your visit, choose one of the following activities:

A Coat For a Seed Students will learn concepts connected to the life cycles of plants via the exploration of the parts of a beans. (Estimated activity time: 30 minutes.)

Plant Parts This activity helps students learn about plant structures by letting them identify which parts of plants some familiar foods represent. For example: is broccoli a fruit, a stem, a bunch of leaves, or flowers? (Estimated activity time: 30-45 minutes.)

Seed Need This activity helps students see how some plants use animals to carry their seeds and disperse them. (Estimated activity time: 40 minutes.)

In addition to the Pre-visit activity, discuss with the students what they know about springtime—the ‘signs of spring’ (new growth, baby plants and animals, flowers, more sunshine, etc).

Post-Visit Activities, Second Grade

To reflect and review after your visit, choose one of the following activities:

Odes to Plants In this activity, students will communicate information about plants through creative poetry, which can incorporate personal values as well as facts. (Estimated activity time: 30 minutes.)