PBL9 Shares the Journey through Biomes Projects with WE Third Graders

In the Journey Through Biomes Project, ninth grade Project-Based Learning students engaged in a cross-curricular project guided by the essential question, "How did we get here?" In order to answer this multifaceted question, students first read “The House on Mango Street” and analyzed how the main character, Esperanza, grapples with her circumstances that lead to the various points in her life that are highlighted throughout the novel. 

The story is written as a series of vignettes, which are short, detailed snapshots in a moment in time. Simultaneously the team also studied ecology, which included biomes and defining features of these biomes, and in social studies they covered migration. To bridge the disciplines, students chose to write a vignette either about a researched organism from their assigned biome or a fictional person based on a historical migration event.

The project culminated in an exhibition at Wyncote Elementary with the third grade team in order to coincide with their life science unit in which they too studied living organisms and biomes. Ninth grade students shared their vignettes with the third graders and also constructed three-dimensional models of their researched biome, which included an interactive learning component.

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