writing school lessons

So I need write and teach two Social Studies lessons before the end of the school year.  I talked with the 3rd grade teacher to do some collaborating.  They have been studying Whidbey Island history this year: first the American Indians, then the pioneers, then us.  They are finishing with a unit on local industry and products.  For Whidbey Island a natural avenue for this is FARMS.  The students are making a book, each page for a farm.  They will get to tour some of the farms they discuss.  She suggested I take one of these and focus my lesson on it.

Well, Steven's 4H weather club happens to meet at Camelot Downs, a farm that specializes in colonial animals.  And they do tours.  (How odd that I would actually have connections.)  I was able to help set up the tour for the 3rd graders.  Since I have taken the tour myself, it will be easier to build a preview type lesson for the class before they get there.  (They have a lot of fowl too that the video does not show: chickens, turkeys, game hens, geese, rock dove, ducks.)




CAMELOT DOWNS: colonial sheep from Mark Plumberg on Vimeo.



Then I had another brilliant idea.  My second social studies lesson needs to combine Social studies and another discipline.  How about science?  There happens to be a honey farm on the island too.  Island Apiaries and of course my bee mentor, Lisa has a farm too.  So how about a lesson on the honeybee, its life, and its importance to our food.
See, I haven't been been wasting my time one bees after all, I was doing homework the whole time.

Now I just have to translate all of these fun learning experiences into boring lesson plan format.