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Fourth Graders Create Biome Boxes

January 23, 2025

I think that education is at its best when it’s interdisciplinary. After all, life is interdisciplinary! Rarely are we ever just working within a single subject area; regardless of vocation, most of us are required to use some combination of knowledge and skill in language, numbers, and even fine arts. If, as educators, we’re helping to form our students into people who will thrive in the world – to become courageous and compassionate leaders – we should be demonstrating how those subjects that students experience in discrete 45-minute blocks are all ultimately interconnected.

“Let me know if there are any tie-ins I can be making in the Art Studio that will back up what you are working on.”

That was the closing line of an email that Mater Christi School art teacher M.C. Baker sent me this past fall, and I didn’t have to think twice before emailing her back with a list of ideas.

The fourth grade science unit for November and December was focused on biomes – geographical regions characterized by specific climate, vegetation, and animal life. My challenge was to make these regions – deserts, grasslands, aquatic zones, temperate and tropical forests, tundra, and taiga – come alive for my students. I was already considering having each student select an example of a particular real-world biome to research and showcase their findings in a travel brochure. M.C.’s invitation allowed the students to take this one step further: We decided that they would each create a “Biome Box:” a 3-D diorama of their chosen biome, to be presented alongside their travel brochure.

We cleared our schedules to create two large morning blocks of time, during which we brought the entire fourth grade down to the Art Studio to construct their Biome Boxes. Those hours were a dizzying whirl of paper, cardboard, found objects and materials that the students brought from home, hot glue guns – and M.C. even let us get out the glitter! The requirement was that students accurately depict the nonliving features of their biome, plus three examples each of animal and plant life. At the end of those two sessions, each student was the proud creator of a Biome Box, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Serengeti to the Baffin Coastal Tundra.

On January 17, the fourth graders displayed their Biome Boxes and travel brochures on tables in the Art Studio and acted as tour guides to a crowd of parents, Mater Christi administrators, and third grade students. The guests were each given a “passport” challenging them to visit one example of each type of biome and obtain a signature from their fourth grade guide. It was a wonderful culminating celebration of all of the fourth graders’ hard work, and you could see the pride in their smiles – just as beautiful as the Biome Boxes they’d created!

M.C. and I wore enormous smiles that morning, too: We are so grateful for colleagues who are willing to collaborate, and for a school that supports such valuable interdisciplinary ventures.

Faith Gong
Grade 4 Teacher