Lesson video

Hello.

This is my dog, Charlie.

And he wanted to say hello today before we started our science lesson.

We're going to be learning about one of his and my favourite scientists today.

I'm going to let him go so that we can get on with our work.

Bye.

Our lesson question today is who is George Washington Carver.

And I just realised I'm wearing the same clothes two lessons in a row.

Never mind.

Our lesson question today is who is George Washington Carver.

And this is our lesson agenda For today.

We are going to learn about his early life.

Then we're going to learn about agriculture, crop rotation, and then why he has the nickname, "The peanut man." And then at the end of the lesson, we're going to write an information text all about George Washington Carver.

For this lesson you will need a piece of paper, a pencil, a coloured pencil and a ruler.

If you don't have those things ready, then go and get them now please, pause the video.

Great.

Now that you've got everything that you need, let's begin.

let's start with our star words, our key vocabulary for today's lesson.

I'm going to say them, and then you're going to say them.

Crop, agriculture, slavery, fertile, pests.

Good job.

We're going to talk about what agriculture means during the lesson.

But let's define the other words now.

A crop is a plant that is grown and harvested for human use.

So for example, a tomato is a crop because we grow them on purpose so that we can eat them.

Something like, a Daisy doesn't count as a crop.

Cause it's just a type of flower.

We don't grow it on purpose for human use.

Slavery is the practise where one human is owned by another human.

But unfortunately this was common practise at some point during history.

That's going to be important to George Washington Carver's life.

Fertile, we would use fertile to describe land So if we say that land is fertile, it means that land can produce a large number of good quality crops or plants.

So an example of some land that's not very fertile is the little patch of soil in my garden, which nothing seems to be able to grow in.

I think it's because it's too Sandy.

So that is not fertile land.

Pests are insects or animals that attack crops.

So an example of a past would be something like a caterpillar that eats cabbage.

It's a past because it's attacking that cabbage crop.

Okay.

Let me introduce you to George Washington Carver.

He was born in the 1860s in the USA.

In United States of America.

Now, as we do our lesson today, I'm going to ask you to take notes as we go.

And the reason for this is cause then at the end, when we write our information texts, you will have done most of the hard work already.

So these are the headings that I'd like you to make notes under.

Early life, agriculture, crop rotation and the peanut man.

Cause those are the sections of our lesson.

And I'll obviously help you to make those notes as we go through.

This is what I would like it to look like.

So you would start with your lesson title at the top of the page, and then each heading should be underlined and then some space left where you're going to make a bullet point notes.

For example, early life.

We already know, born in the 1860s.

Okay? You don't have to worry about the notes so far, but this is how I'd like you to lay it out.

Take a picture of that in your brain cause I'm going to go back to the other slide.

Okay.

These are your four headings.

Can you pause the video and set your page up? So you've got those headings with the space between ready to make your notes.

Pause the video and do that now, please.

Great.

Okay.

Let's get to our first section then.

So if you want to, while I'm teaching, you can make some notes as I go and you can pause the video when you want to to write something down.

Or you can listen to the whole section and then when we get to the end, I would give you a chance and some prompt questions for you to go back and write your notes for each section.

Its up to you, just depends on the way that you work.

Okay.

Early life.

Let's go.

So, in the first part of George Washington Carver's life, he was enslaved.

That means he was a slave.

He was the property of somebody else.

And he lived in Missouri.

The state of Missouri in the USA.

Unlike most children who are born into slavery, we don't know the exact year and date that he was born, but we think it was in the 1860s around 1864.

A week after his birth, Carver was kidnapped along with his sister and mother from the farm.

So because he was considered property at that time, somebody wanted to steal him.

His mother and her sister were sold to other people.

But George Washington Carver was found and returned to his original owners.

Shortly after he was returned, slavery ended in Missouri.

it was banned.

It was no longer legal or allowed for you to own another person.

The people who'd originally owned George Washington Carver were called Moses and Susan.

And they decided that after slavery ended that they would raise George Washington Carver like their own son.

And so he lived with them and they taught him to read and to write.

And even from a really young age, George Washington Carver took a big interest in plants and he was experimenting with things that would kill pests and make soil better.

And so he became known as the "plant doctor" to the local farmers.

So that was his first nickname the "plant doctor." At the age of 11, still quite young, George Washington Carver left the farm because he needed to travel to find a school that he could attend.

However that first school he found, he was quite disappointed in he didn't think the education was good enough.

So he moved again two years later to Kansas.

And for the next 10 years or so George Washington Carver moved from town to town putting himself through school and trying to find a good education for himself.

Eventually, he managed to get himself through university and he actually became the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree.

Which is very impressive.

So a Bachelor of Science degree means that you studied science at university and then you get awarded your degree at the end when you pass.

And he was the first person to do that.

If you managed to make some notes during that, then great.

If not, that's okay.

Now is your chance to make some notes.

You can use these questions to help you.

So what happened to, so GWC is George Washington Carver.

What happened to George Washington Car.

I'm going to try again.

What happened when George Washington Carver was very young? What happened when slavery ended? Why did he leave home? And what was George Washington Carver, the first African American to earn? Those are prompts that you can use to write your notes.

Pause the video and make your notes now please.

Great.

We're going to move on to our next section now, which is all about agriculture.

So you should now be making notes under the next heading, Agriculture.

Agriculture is the practise of farming, including growing crops.

So you can kind of just think of agriculture as farming.

Can you say that definition with me.

Two, three, The practise of farming including the growing of crops.

Good job.

Saying definitions out loud can help us to remember them.

These are some examples of crops that you might grow.

So an apple is a crop.

All right.

There's some rice at the bottom of the screen or cotton.

So sometimes crops are things that we eat like apples and rice.

But sometimes crops might be things that we don't eat, but we use like cotton.

The white kind of fluffy stuff you can see in that picture.

Agriculture is really important for lots of reasons.

Here are some of them.

Agriculture feeds the world without agriculture we wouldn't have the food that we need to eat.

It gives us raw materials like cotton that we can use to make into things.

And it employs 70% of people.

That means 70% of the people who live on our planet, their job is something to do with agriculture.

And so without agriculture, they wouldn't have a job.

Okay? So those are the three reasons why agriculture is so important.

Feeds the world, raw materials and employees 70% of people.

Can you repeat those three reasons back to me please? Number one? Good job.

Can you now try and see if you can do it with your eyes closed.

I'm going to have a go first and then you can have a go.

Feeds the world, raw materials and employees 70% of people.

I managed to remember without even peeking.

See if you can have a go now too, if you have to do a little peek that's okay.

Did you remember them all? Great.

Well done.

Got a bit of a last question for you.

I've got two diagrams here of two different farms. So you've got farmer A and farm B.

And you can see from the key at the bottom that those little pink circles represent, well what do they represent? Find it with your finger and tell me.

Great.

They represent a hundred apples.

So how many apples does farm A produce? Can you count? Look at the key and work it out for me.

Great.

Farm A produces 400 apples because there are four dots.

So 100, 200, 300, 400.

What about farm B? How many apples does farm B produce? Let's count 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700 apples.

Okay.

So which farm produces the most apples? Point to your screen.

Farm B produces the most apples.

Are they the same size? Yeah, the farms are the same size.

So which then is the better farm? Point to your screen.

Well, its farm B, isn't it? Because if you can produce more apples or more of the crop that you want to grow on the same size of land, then you're doing a better job.

This idea is called crop yield.

So crop yield is the amount of crop grown per unit of land.

So farm B has a bigger crop yield or a higher crop yield.

Can you repeat that back to me.

What does farm B have? A higher crop yield.

Great.

So, in the early nineteen hundreds the average farmer in the USA produce enough food to feed a family of five.

But today's farmers can feed that family and another hundred people.

So that means crop yields have increased massively over the past a hundred years.

We can now grow more crops than we ever could before.

And George Washington Carver is a big reason for that.

So he was a scientist who studied agriculture.

He studied farming and how we can make farms better and grow more crops.

We're going to learn how he did that in a moment.

Can you please make some notes under this section, agriculture.

And you can use these questions to help you.

What is agriculture? What are some examples of crops? Why is agriculture important? and what is crop yield? Pause the video to make these notes for me now please.

Great.

The next thing we're going to look at is crop rotation.

So this is one of the most important things that George Washington Carver came up with to improve agriculture.

So crop rotation is a method of farming where different plants are grown on the same field in rotation.

So before crop rotation exist, farmers would just grow the same crop in the same field over and over again, year after year.

So for example, they would grow wheat and then they'd harvest it and then they'd grow wheat again and then they'd harvest it.

In crop rotation, You change the crops that you're growing.

So through his work on soil chemistry, George Washington Carver learned that years of growing the same crop, so growing cotton year after year had depleted the nutrients from the soil.

And so the yields of cotton were becoming lower, less and less cotton was being able to be grown in the same field.

But he found that by growing certain plants in rotation with cotton like peanuts or sweet potatoes, the soil quality could be increased and the fertility could be increased.

And this meant that yield was able to increase and more cotton was being able to be growing again.

So this is an example on the screen of crop rotation.

So for example, you can see in year one it starts with corn and then in year two you would grow oats and then in year three you would grow wheat and then in year four clovers, and then you'd go back again.

Okay? Each of these plants are taking different nutrients out of the soil and some of those plants like clover are putting nutrients back into the soil.

So the rotation is really healthy for the soil.

And ultimately, healthy soil equals healthy plants.

What does healthy soil equal? Healthy plants.

Exactly.

So here's a picture of crop rotation in action.

You can see you've got two fields next to each other, growing different crops.

And that would be one year.

And then in the next year they'd swap over.

So this is our definition of crop rotation.

Just to recap.

A method of farming where a number of different plants are grown one after the other on a field so that the soil stays healthy and fertile.

Quite a long definition this time.

Can you get your finger? Can you read it with me on the screen, please? Get your finger ready at the beginning, we're going to read it together.

A method of farming where a number of different plants are grown one after the other on a field so that the soil stays healthy and fertile.

Good job.

So crop rotation has lots of advantages and these are some of them.

It means that there are fewer diseases for the plants because the disease can't build up in one place.

It's the same with the pests.

There are fewer pests cause they're not building up in one place.

And it makes the soil more fertile, which gives higher crop yields.

Can you please use these questions to make some notes on crop rotation.

Who pioneered crop rotation? That means who first thought of that? What is crop rotation? and why is crop rotation a good method of farming? Pause the video and make those notes for me now.

Great.

In the next part of the lesson, we are going to learn about the second nickname in George Washington Carver's life, "the peanut man." So, in George Washington Carver's method of crop rotation, he would swap out growing of cotton with growing up peanuts some years.

And this meant that the farmers cotton yields increased, but it also meant that they had lots and lots of peanuts, which they didn't normally have.

So George Washington Carver decided that he was going to come up with lots and lots of different uses of peanuts.

So he essentially sat down and he went, right, how many things can I think of that a peanut can do? And he came up with loads of uses.

So for example, he came up with, making milk from peanuts, making worcestershire sauce, making drink called punch, making cooking oils from peanut salad oil, paper from peanuts, cosmetics, soaps, and even stains for woods.

And those are just some of the uses.

He came up with more than 300 uses.

Can you remember any of those uses that I just said? I said quite a long list quite quickly.

So let's go over them again.

So I'm going to say it, and then you're going to say it.

So some of the uses he came up with from peanuts were milk, worcestershire sauce, a drink called punch, cooking oil, salad oil, Paper, cosmetics, soaps and wood stains.

So just some of the uses.

Can you now use these questions to make some notes about the peanut man? Why was George Washington Carver nicknamed the peanut man? Why did George Washington Carver want to find lots of uses for peanuts? and what were some of the uses he invented for peanuts? You don't need to write them all, but two or three examples would be great.

Pause the video and make some notes for me now please.

Great.

Okay.

You're now ready to write your information text.

I'm going to show you how I would use my notes to do this under the visualizer.

Well done for all of your hard work today.

I hope that you are proud of the information text that you have produced.

Just before you go, I have a game that you might like to play.

It's a game that I sometimes play with my class in my school, and it's really fun.

And it's a bit like what George Washington Carver did with all his peanut inventions.

So George Washington Carver sat down and he thought of as many different uses as he could for peanuts.

And I wonder if you can do the same for a piece of paper.

How many ways can you use this piece of paper? So for example, I could use it to write up.

It's quite a brilliant use.

But, I could also use it as an umbrella.

Or I could make it into a crown.

Maybe I could scratch it up and use it to play a ballgame.

I would like you, if you think it sounds fun to set yourself a challenge of how many uses of a piece of paper can you think of and write down in 60 seconds? So time yourself.

When I've played this game before the record that somebody found was 30.

They came up with 30 uses of a piece of paper in 60 seconds.

So if you'd like to challenge yourself, have a go at doing that today.

If you'd like to share your work with Oak National, you can ask your parent or your carer to share your work for you using the #OakNational, LearnwithOak and if you want, you can also type Teach_STEMinism which is me and then I will be able to see your work too.

Don't forget to do your end of lesson quiz before you go and have a fantastic rest of your day.

I will hopefully see you back here for another science lesson soon.

Bye everybody.