UNIT
1: LESSON 2
PLANTS WITH A PERSONALITY
SUBJECT: Language
Arts, Music, Dance, Art
OBJECTIVE:
Students will appreciate the beauty, strength and complexity of corn
plants, and their own bodies.
EVAULATION: Students
will be able to imagine, and express, new connections between themselves
and corn plants. The way they see a corn plant will be changed forever,
and they will be able to express it.
BACKGROUND FOR
TEACHERS:
In this excerpt
from "Hiawatha's Fasting" in The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, a corn plant (maize) is given "robes" and " soft, yellow
tresses."
ill at
length a small green feather
From the earth shot slowly upward,
Then another and another
And before the Summer ended
Stood the maize in all its beauty,
With its shining robes about it,
And its long, soft yellow tresses;
And in rapture Hiawatha
Cried aloud, "It is Mondamin!
Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!"
In the story Claire
Plays Basketball, Claire makes connections between corn leaves and
her arms reaching to the sky, between corn roots and her feet racing
across a basketball court. As she learned about the growing point of
corn deep inside the whorl of leaves, she thought of her own heart protected
by her ribs. Her stomach growled when she thought about the plant manufacturing
sugar. Her ears perked up at the discussion of corn ears.
STUDENT ACTIVITIES:
1. Ask students
to read the story, Claire Plays Basketball
then read the poem from the Song of Hiawatha. See if they can point
out the connections that Claire makes between the corn plants and her
own body. (See examples listed above.)
2. Use these pictures
or make an activity for students to search out pictures of corn in magazines
or other sources. Then ask students to complete one or more of the following
activities.
-
Create a song
or dance illustrating the emergence of a seed, and that seed growing
into a tall plant.
Draw or paint
a corn plant-personified. (For example, they could draw an ear of
corn as a girl with "soft-yellow tresses" or a corn plant as a basketball
player with roots instead of feet.)
-
Write a poem
in which they compare their body to a corn plant.
-
Write a story
in which they ARE the growing point, or the root, or the leaf, and
ask them to describe how the air feels, the soil feels, what sounds
they hear, if they feel safe or frightened, whatever they are experiencing.
This could be acted out, or danced as well.
-
Imagine how
it feels to live inches away from the same corn plants your entire
life, then write a play about the experience. Draw your "neighborhood."
-
Create a cartoon
character, in which a corn plant becomes a person. See "Captain
Cornelius" on the NCGA web page : http://www.ncga.com/06info_bin/kids/capt_corn.html.
3. . If possible,
take students to a cornfield, and let their imaginations run wild! If
that's not possible, bring a corn plant to the classroom. Or grow one!
Anything that students can touch and feel will enhance this lesson.
