Science Activities, 51:129135, 2014

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0036-8121 print / 1940-1302 online
DOI: 10.1080/00368121.2014.931271

The Poetry of Dandelions: Merging

Content-Area Literacy and Science
Content Knowledge in a Fourth-Grade
Science Classroom
Lauren Madden and Anne Peel
The College of New Jersey,
Ewing, NJ
Heather Watson
Northwest Elementary School,
Wayne County, NC

ABSTRACT As teachers begin to implement the Common Core State

Standards (CCSS) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), they are
challenged to focus on informational texts across the disciplines and engage
children in critical thinking about complex scientic ideas. In this article, we present an integrated sciencelanguage arts lesson that explores plant adaptations
using authentic texts and schoolyard ecosystem exploration. We describe
strategies for using poetry and other authentic texts in science instruction,
constructing scientic arguments and explanations using evidence, and making
text to world connections. This lesson is written in alignment with the NGSS
and CCSS and is intended to be taught at the fourth-grade level.
KEYWORDS elementary science, plant adaptations, scienceliteracy integrated lessons

INTRODUCTION

Address correspondence to Lauren

Madden, The College of New Jersey,
Elementary and Early Childhood
Education, 2000 Pennington Rd.,
Ewing, NJ 08628, USA. E-mail:
maddenl@tcnj.edu
Color versions of one or more of the
figures in the article can be found
online at www.tandfonline.com/vsca.

In elementary schools across the country and around the world, children
learn about plant growth and development in science lessons. Plant adaptations
are a critical point of focus in any instruction regarding plants. Adaptations are
the features that help organisms to survive in their environment, and understanding the types of adaptations various plants have can help children make
broad connections between organisms and the environments in which they live
and grow.
Much of the focus of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is on
crosscutting concepts that help connect ideas within and between the scientic
disciplines. The study of plant adaptations addresses two of these concepts:
structure and function and systems (National Research Council [NRC] 2013).
Plant adaptations are most often structural features that affect the function of
the organism. Once students develop an understanding of these functions, they
can then understand the role that organism plays in an ecosystem. These ideas
are directly addressed in the NGSS standard 4-LS1-1, which states, Construct
129

an argument that plants and animals have internal and

external structures that function to support survival,
growth, behavior, and reproduction.
However, many textbooks and other teaching resources focus on exceptional plant adaptations, such as
how the structure of cacti in deserts allow the plant to
store water, or how the dark color of plants in
the tundra maximizes solar heat absorption. While
these are important adaptations, for most children they
are unfamiliar in a real-life day-to-day context. Harlen
(2001) suggests that the best science teaching builds on
childrens existing knowledge of the world around
them. Likewise, the NGSS suggest connecting teaching
to childrens background knowledge to facilitate meaning-making experiences. When teachers start instruction using examples of phenomena that are familiar to
students, they are more likely to help students feel
engaged and interested in their own learning.
The NGSS were written in alignment with the recently adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
in language arts and literacy (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief
State School Ofcers [NGA] 2010; NRC 2013). One
focus of both sets of standards is the importance of
using informational texts in elementary school instruction. To write the article, a science educator, literacy
educator, and elementary school teacher collaborated
to develop a strategy for teaching an integrated science
and language arts lesson focused on plant adaptations using informational texts and an example familiar
to most children: dandelions.

WHY SCIENCE IN THE LANGUAGE

ARTS CLASSROOM?
Grappling with scientic texts in the language arts
classroom provides students with greater opportunities
to develop the critical comprehension skills necessary
for academic success. The CCSS in language arts
attempt to address the way in which informational texts
have traditionally been overlooked in elementary
school classrooms in favor of narrative and ctional
works. In the past, there was a strong belief that as long
as children could decode uently by the end of the
third grade, they would be able to successfully comprehend content-area texts in the upper elementary and
secondary grades. This belief, often called the inoculation method, has been found to be not only false but
L. Madden et al.

also a possible reason why so many children experience

a decline in reading achievement as they transition into
fourth grade (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy [CCAAL] 2010). Students who have not
been taught to set a purpose for reading and to use
strategies to make sense of complicated informational
texts may ounder when faced with the disciplinary
learning demands in middle and high school. Preventing this decline requires a balanced approach to
comprehensive literacy instruction, and balancing
instruction means bringing science into the language
arts classroom (Romance and Vitale 2012).
Balanced literacy instruction uses texts drawn from
subject-area domains as a resource for learning. The
acquisition of knowledge sets an authentic purpose for
reading that fuels and enhances comprehension
(Gambrell, Malloy, and Mazzoni 2011; Madda et al.
2011). Students can be engaged in meaning-making
with authentic texts such as news articles, recipes,
letters, instructions, and blog posts. Ideally, teachers
should provide a wide array of different kinds of texts
that build scientic knowledge, link concepts, and
expand content-area vocabulary even at the youngest
grades. By engaging students in learning to read informational texts in the primary years, educators set the
groundwork for success in the later years.

WHY LITERACY IN THE SCIENCE

CLASSROOM?
Researchers have found that a students background
knowledge in science correlates to his achievement
(Grant and Fisher 2010). Background knowledge serves
as the foundation for new knowledge. Unfortunately,
many elementary students arrive in class with limited
prior science instruction (Banilower et al. 2013). When
teaching a lesson on a subject such as plant structure
and function, an effective teacher rst assesses students
background knowledge and, second, identies those
students with less prior knowledge and uses various
strategies to address any areas of deciency in those
students with less prior knowledge. One way to do this
is to import the kinds of reading and writing activities
that are usually the mainstay of the language arts block
into a science lesson. For example, reading, writing,
and sharing poems about dandelions can help to subtly
enhance students prior knowledge.
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Another reason that literacy needs to nd a place

in science instruction is that reading scientic texts is
challenging, and these texts increase in complexity as
students advance in school. The CCSS for both literature and informational texts have raised the level
of rigor that is expected in texts used across the grade
levels. Students who will meet the challenge of the
CCSS need to be exposed to high-level informational
texts at the earliest grades, and they will need equally
rigorous comprehension scaffolding to support them
(Cervetti and Pearson 2012; Frey and Fisher 2013;
Moss 2005). Teaching explicit strategies for reading
informational texts offers students a powerful tool for
beginning to understand the visualverbal connection,
organizational text features, internal text structures,
and specialized content-area vocabulary (Ogle 2003).

ONE TEACHERS EXPERIENCE

We will present an integrated scienceliteracy lesson
that uses multiple genres of text (poetry and informational text) to approach plant adaptations, using the
specic and familiar example of dandelions. In an
effort to meet the goals set out by the CCSS and
NGSS, Heather Watson, an elementary school teacher,
developed and taught an integrated scienceliteracy lesson using a balanced literacy approach. In prior lessons,

she used inquiry-based explorations to introduce her

students to plant structures and functions. Because of
the goals laid out in the CCSS and NGSS, She was
faced with an instructional challenge: She needed a
way to work with both poetry and plant adaptations. I
remembered a poem told to me by my (now) 93-yearold great aunt. [My aunt] had to memorize a poem
called, The Dandelion [Withers, Brown, and Tate
1920] for her second grade teacherand still remembers it all these years later. That poem would be the perfect transition piece for my own students! To address
the CCSSs focus on informational text and to better
describe the structure and function of dandelions, Mrs.
Watson opted to also use Controlling Dandelions
in Lawns (http://www.americanlawnguide.com/
lawn-weeds/54-controlling-dandelions-in-lawns.html) in
her integrated lesson. Table 1 details the specic NGSS
and CCSS standards addressed in this lesson.
Since she had already covered basics of plant structures and function and plant life cycles, she was ready
to connect this more advanced ideaplant adaptationsto multiple genres of text, namely poetry and
informational text. This connection between science
and literature represents a cross-disciplinary connection
within the third E of the 5-E learning cycle model1
for inquiry-based instruction (Bybee et al. 2006). Yet in
order to do so, Mrs. Watson needed to address the
heavy vocabulary load in these passages. Knowing her

TABLE 1 Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core State Standards Addressed
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
 4-LS1-1 Construct an argument that plants and
animals have internal and external structures
that function to support survival, growth,
behavior, and reproduction
 Practice 7. Constructing explanations
 Practice 8. Obtaining, evaluating, and
communicating information
 Crosscutting Concept 4. Systems and system
models
 Crosscutting Concept 6. Structure and
function

Common Core State Standards (CCSS)

 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.5 Explain major differences between poems,
drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g.,
verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings,
descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking
about a text.
 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.9 Integrate information from two texts on the
same topic in order to write or speak about the subject
knowledgeably.
 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.4 Determine the meaning of general academic
and domain-specific words or phrases in a text relevant to a grade 4
topic or subject area.
 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.3 Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts
in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened
and why, based on specific information in the text.
 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.10 By the end of year, read and comprehend
informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and
technical texts, in the grades 45 text complexity band proficiently,
with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

Note. Complete standards, crosscutting concepts, and science practices are listed for the NGSS Standards.

131

The Poetry of Dandelions

students prior content knowledge in both language arts

(structure of various genres) and science (basic plant
structures and life cycles), she elected to start this lesson
by orienting all students to a common language
through vocabulary instruction. This strategy decreased
the cognitive load of the advanced vocabulary and
allowed her to focus on the lessons overarching goals:
to introduce plant adaptations and connect poetry to
informational scientic texts.
After discussing both passages, Mrs. Watsons students explored the dandelions in their own school ecosystem. Comprehension of the complex informational
texts was scaffolded through explicit instruction in a
text-to-self reading strategy, as the students were able to
make text-to-life connections and carefully observe the
anatomy of these plants and the role they played in
the schoolyard ecosystem.
The lesson plan Mrs. Watson used follows.

Lesson Objectives
1. To familiarize students with the features that make
poetry unique such as rhythm, personication, and
gurative language (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.5);
2. To practice critical thinking skills by exploring texts
with clearly juxtaposed purposes (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.9, NGSS Practices 7 and 8);
3. To interact with learned vocabulary in context
(CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.4, NGSS Practice 8);
4. To use informational scientic texts to learn science
content (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.3, NGSS Practice 8); and
5. To increase understanding of the structure of plant
adaptations, specically dandelions. (CCSS.ELALiteracy.RI.4.10; NGSS 4-LS1-1, NGSS 4&6 Crosscutting Concepts).

Materials
 The Dandelion (Withers, Brown, and Tate 1920, 20)
 Controlling Dandelions in Lawns (www.american-

lawnguide.com/lawn-weeds/54-cont)
 Outdoor natural area with dandelions growing
 Science notebook or journal for recording observations or free writing a response following activities
L. Madden et al.

Procedure
1. Prior to giving the selections, remind students about
terms in Oh Dandelion! and Controlling Dandelions in Lawns that may be challenging: poem,
stanza, verse, rhyme, rhythm, personication, simile, alliteration, metaphor, poet, maintenance, and
herbicide.
2. Distribute Oh Dandelion! to your students. Have
the students read through the passage independently. Have students read with a highlighter and
highlight any words that remind them of a feeling
while they read. Put a smiley face for positive feelings and a frowny face in the margin for negative
feelings. Begin the discussion by having students
share the words they highlighted and continue with
clarifying and probing questions.
3. Then, to facilitate the class discussion, begin to ask
the questions:
a. How do you think the poet feels about dandelions? What words in the text make you
believe this?
b. How does the poet use gurative language as
a tool to help describe his feelings about dandelions? Can you give me some examples
from the text?
c. Which symbols are used in this poem?
4. Distribute Controlling Dandelions in Lawns to
students. Ask them not to read it yet. Read this article to the class as a whole group and encourage students to implement the smiley face/frowny face
strategy used with the poem. As you read, watch for
student reaction and allow it to lead your discussion
naturally. As there is a drastic and dramatic contrast
from one reading to the next, student reactions will
most likely come quickly. Ask similar questions to
elicit clarity from the students as they begin to voice
their observations. A few suggested questions:
a. What do you think the author believes about
dandelions? What words in the text make
you think this?
b. What is this authors purpose in writing this
piece? How does this contrast with the
authors purpose from the poem we just
read?
i. What is the job of this author?
ii. How might his job affect his attitude about
dandelions?
132

iii. How might his job affect his attitude about

other plants that grow in our schoolyard?
iv. What do you think he might like to see
there? Why?
5. When discussion reaches its natural conclusion,
take the class outside to your preselected natural
area with their journals and texts in hand. Ask them
to think about the two passages and decide which
one they most agree with, by implementing a takea-stand strategy: ask students to stand on one part
of the schoolyard if they prefer the poem and
another if they prefer the article. Next, ask students
to observe dandelions and their structures and adaptations with respect to the two readings (Figure 1)
and record their observations in their science notebooks. A few suggested questions:
a. How are the dandelions spread throughout
the outdoor area?
i. Are they in different phases of growth? How
can you tell?
b. What features of the dandelions help the
dandelions grow in different places?
c. What can you say about the dandelions parts
(new owers, mature owers, stems, leaves,
roots)?
6. To conclude the lesson, ask all students to bring a
dandelion back to the classroom to explore further
and create a diagram in their science notebooks.
a. To guide science notebook entries, ask students to use what they have learned from

FIGURE 1 Dandelions on the schoolyard.

133

reading both passages to help structure their

notes and diagrams (Figure 2).
b. Encourage students to use dandelion parts
(stems, leaves, and owers) as crayons to
enhance their observational drawings in science notebook entries.
c. Ask students to write a one-sentence What
I learned statement at the conclusion of
their notebook entries to serve as an assessment in the lesson.

LESSON OUTCOMES AND STUDENT

COMMENTS
After teaching this lesson, Mrs. Watson reected on
her practice and reviewed her students work. She concluded that the students learned about both literacy
and science through this lesson as they worked with the
dandelions in both components of the lesson. They
understood the contrast that was intentionally paired
between the selections. In fact, the students were distressed when they realized what the authors purpose
was for the second article. One student cried out
in horror, Mrs. Watson, hes murdering the dandelions! On the other hand, other students recalled how
weeds, like dandelions, growing on a playing eld
could be a nuisance when playing sports. These reactions provided evidence that the students were meeting
the NGSS Practice 8 and CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.9
standards in that they were comparing texts, making
connections between text and real life, and evaluating
evidence in their decision making. During the outdoor
portion of our activities, the students enjoyed looking
for the dandelions in different phases of growth (see
Figures 35). Some found plants with unopened owers. Others found the golden owers the poet wrote
about, and even questioned why this ower was able to
grow on a plant with another that had seed heads (and
was similarly sized) directly beside it. In their minds,
the children were not only making direct connections
to earlier instruction on the life cycle of the dandelion
but also making internal connections to the information they learned in such a way as to elicit questions
regarding what they saw. The students not only learned
the scientic concepts, but they were also able to
develop higher-order thinking questions; this was quite
an achievement, providing evidence that the students
met the goals set out in NGSS Standard 4-LS1-1.
The Poetry of Dandelions

FIGURE 4 One student examining dandelion structures.

Still other students in Mrs. Watsons class who were

struggling with the more complex issues of the dandelions development were able to apply their knowledge
of a plants system for feeding itself (covered in lessons
prior to the one described above) in a very practical
way. They noticed that the knees of their trousers were
stained green from the chlorophyll in the dandelion

and other schoolyard plants leaves and stems. They

quickly connected this observation to their prior
knowledge of plant structures and shaded their diagrams of plant parts with the chlorophyll found in the
dandelions crumpled leaves. These same students then
began to question whether or not the yellow ower
would give yellow color since the green parts worked.
They tested this idea by crumpling the delicate ower
and were successful in coloring the owers in their science notebook entries with the yellow in the plant.
They, too, had been able to expand their basic understanding of the green chlorophyll within dandelion
structures into another hypothesis (Could the yellow
owers change the color of other objects?), which they
tested immediately.

FIGURE 3 One student observing a dandelion specimen.

FIGURE 5 Students selecting dandelion samples.

FIGURE 2 Science notebook entry after fieldwork.

L. Madden et al.

134

Author 3s students were able to make some strong

connections between the two readings and two genres
presented, as well as between the content presented in
the readings and real-life scientic phenomena. Specically, the children were able to engage with real-life
phenomena demonstrating two key crosscutting concepts described in the NGSS: how organisms structures
affect their functions, and the role individual organisms
play in their own ecosystems. However, this type of work
should not be limited to fourth graders alone. The following modications could be made to this activity to
address the needs of younger and older elementary
students:
 Younger elementary-aged children could complete

similar lessons using just the poetry portion and the

eldwork. They could still work with the chlorophyll
as their crayon for the day and pair the lesson with a
visual artwork such as Eagle Cliff, Franconia Notch,
New Hampshire (J. F. Cropsey) or nonction picture
books.
 Older children might work through this lesson but
go deeper to research how different plants are able to
reproduce differently. For instance, how do the
seed parachutes on a dandelion bring about new
dandelions differently than a kernel of corn creates a
new corn plant or an eye from a potato yields a new
potato vine? Students could be given an opportunity
to research topics and present them to the class as
the experts on particular topics. This would set up a
perfect reciprocal teaching situation.

CONCLUSIONS
Appendix M of the NGSS states that reading in science requires an appreciation of the norms and conventions of the discipline of science, including understanding the nature of evidence used, an attention to
precision and detail, and the capacity to make and
assess intricate arguments. By using a balanced literacy
approach followed by authentic scientic observation,
the children in Mrs. Watsons class engaged in scientic explorations and used details from the readings to
enhance their observations of dandelion plants.
Through their immersion with both texts, they were
able to discern subtle features of dandelions that serve
as adaptations, which help the plants to grow and

135

survive. Integrating science and literacy instruction

helped these students contextualize their scientic
observations. As a result, the children were able to
think critically about both literature and adaptations of
plants within their own ecosystem.

NOTE
1. The 5-E learning cycle model for instruction uses the following
ve steps: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, Evaluate. During
the third E (Explain), the teacher, students, or text explain the
science content after students have a chance to explore
phenomena.

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The Poetry of Dandelions

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