Desert biome lesson

Hi Future Ticia 2024 here, way back when my kids were in preschool and we had a rather lackadaisical bit of geography lessons we did this great desert biome lesson that was a fun Book and Activity with an amazing picture book. This was a great Homeschooling Preschool lesson, and we had a lot of fun, and with some changes you can use this lesson through early elementary. Now I return you to past Ticia 2010.

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I can’t remember if anyone else has done this, but we read Cactus Hotel last week.  It’s a great nonfiction story of how a cactus is home to many creatures in the desert (Future Ticia 2024 finds it amusing how blogging back then was just this assumption how we are all just reading these same things and no one will randomly stumble on this years later).  The kids loved reading it and we talked a lot about the different animals.  I had all sorts of ideas about how I could make this into a complicated project, but then I finally realized go for simple, and you get it done.

Desert biome lesson supplies

• cardstock (you could use copy paper, but sturdy paper stands up to all you’re going to glue onto this paper)
• sandpaper
• crayons
• glue gluesticks would work for most of this and is my preferred method of gluing
• printout (on my subscriber page, JOIN MY NEWSLETTER)

Spine book for the desert biome lesson

Future Ticia 2024 is adding this in. I forget exactly when I found Cactus Hotel, but I’m pretty sure I found the book back when I was teaching. It’s a favorite because it does such a great job of showing a life cycle of a biome from the cactus growing, and showing how different animals rely on the cactus for their home at different stages of the cactus’ life including after the cactus fell.

Cactus and Desert biome videos

Hey, it’s the future and now we can use videos to share more information.

Oh but this is much more in the lines of the Cactus Hotel book, it shows the day in the life of a Saguaro cactus.

The variety of biomes found on earth are fascinating to me. Also, completely different point, but that earth can have both a hot and a cold desert is wildly amusing because for so much of my life I assumed desert meant hot, when it just means lack of water.

More great early picture book lessons

• Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Me on the Map: Me– I have a whole series on this, and it all starts with “Me”
• Legend of the Bluebonnet
• Mortimer’s First Garden– I adore the Mortimer books
• Elements of Story– this was from a picture book version of either a Laura Ingalls Wilder book or maybe Tom Sawyer, I used both for some of our state studies as famous people from different states

Okay, I now return you to Past Ticia 2010.

Creating our Cactus Hotel craft

1. Cut cardstock in half (not necessary, but that’s the size we wanted).
2. Cut out a cactus shape from the sandpaper.
3. Color the cactus with crayon (it makes a cool texture).

4.  Start cutting out pictures galore.  Seriously, you haven’t seen the finished product yet.  They went nuts with the pictures.

5.  Glue like it’s about to go out of style.  Have you noticed the 20-cent bottles of glue right now?  Now you know why I buy them like a crazy woman.

Honest it takes two pages of pictures to cover up half a page of artwork (Future Ticia 2024 says in the revised version I was able to get it down to 1 page).  Right?

Can you guess which one is mine?

Future Ticia 2024 has changed how I uploaded them, mine is the big one so you can see what I thought it would look like in my head. On the left from top to bottom, my best guess: Batman, Princess’ second cactus, Superman, and then the bottom on the right is Superman’s second where he drew a second cactus.

We had a blast doing this, and it’s going in the lapbook for four states (all of them desert states).

• Head on over to A Mommy’s Adventures to see what other story related projects people are doing.
• KODJOME Romaric, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons