Grades 3-7
24 activities—181 pages

Crazy About Cotton is designed to encourage students to look closely at an important crop in our economy and in the world. Students will gain an understanding about where their food and fabrics come from before they appear in grocery and retail stores.

The book includes a DVD of a field trip to a cotton farm. This unique component brings the classroom lessons to life as students watch the many stages of growing and harvesting cotton. A script of the video is provided that helps teachers correlate scenes in the film with the matching activities in the book.

Crazy About Cotton begins with students conducting a careful examination of cotton fiber. Then they will follow the cotton from the planting of the seeds, to the irrigation and growth of the plant, control of insects, and the harvesting and ginning of the cotton. They will discover some of the many uses of cotton.

Processing skills practiced by students will include observing, communicating, collecting and recording data, comparing and contrasting, interpreting data, and classifying. Crazy About Cotton uses the real-world context of a well-known commodity to capture your students’ interest while integrating science, math, geography, economics, history, and language arts.