What is Wheat Week? Wheat Week is a seies of five lessons, delivered over the course of one week, educating students about water, soil, wheat, salmon, dams and energy and how they impact our daily lives.
Who can receive Wheat Week? Any school within Adams, Asotin, Columbia, Garfield, Lincoln, Spokane and Whitman County can request Wheat Week. Teachers are asked to plan together so each day 4 -5 classrooms (grades 4 - 7) can receive the daily, one-hour lesson.
Wheat Week Lessons:
DAY 1 - Water in our World: Explore the water cycle, including evaporation, condensation and precipitation, through classroom participation and a rain shower at the end! Students create their own wheat terrarium to see the water cycle at work.
DAY 2 - Amazing Soils: Differentiate between the three soil types (sand, silt and clay) based on particle size and permeability through a hands-on experiment. Discover how soil is made. Discuss the properties of soil and their importances to farmers and community members.
DAY 3 - Wheatshed/Watershed: Discover what a watershed is and how we affect the watershed we live in. Students create their own paper watersheds and learn about the impacts of erosion, weathering and deposition of soil. Students compare their watershed to their local wheatshed.
DAY 4 - Wheat Here, Wheat There: Discover the various forms of energy required to move wheat from the field to the dinner table. Students learn about the role dams play in transporation and salmon migration as they make a model of a hydroelectric dam.
DAY 5 - Wheat We Eat: Explore the wheat plant as a system of parts. Discuss implications of inputs and outputs to the system and how that affects the plant. Students examine a wheat seed under magnification and explore products made from wheat. This lesson ends the week with a tasty snack from wheat products. |
