LEARNING ABOUT PLANTS WITH REVOLVING CIRCLES

 

Shared by Lourdes Elvira: 

I have decided to use the 'Revolving Circles' combined with the strategy of working in pairs (stronger-weaker).

It doesn't really matter how many students are in the class, because this activity can be done in circles of ten or twelve students. They will work in groups in pairs but generally organized in circles so that they can interact and talk with different classmates. Therefore, there will be two circles: the outer and the inner.

First, at the peer group level, the teacher will hand out two different worksheets: one of them contains the scientific name of a species of herbaceous plant and the other contains the scientific name of a species of arboreal plant, so there are only two types of plants. These plants are basically native flora so they can collect information about them and the main objective is to get class notes from their classmates. For example, students in the outer circle receive the herbaceous plant species worksheet (H) and students in the inner circle receive the tree plant species worksheet (T). First of all, they must collect information on the tablet about the specific species in their worksheet (includes: characteristics, a drawing, ecosystem, climate, fruits, flowers and leaves, their use in the gastronomic or pharmaceutical industry ... etc. ). And after collecting all the information about their own plant, they have to start collecting the rest of the plants and the information about them from their classmates, but in order.

The dynamics would be as follows: the outer circle receives the herbaceous plant species so that they have to collect all the information about the different species from their classmates by turning clockwise and sitting in the positions of the plant species of the trees (T) to exchange information about herbaceous and arboreal plants so the inner circle (which is the students of tree plant species) rotates counterclockwise and they sit in the positions of the students of herbaceous plant species (H). Thus, working in pairs, they collect information about the opposite type of plants until they collect all the plants that are given to the students in both circles.