Introduction
"The Easter Rabbit lays Easter eggs." "My favorite animals are horses and unicorns". Young children have a natural curiosity about animals. However, they have many misconceptions and confusions about how animals survive, raise their young, and fit into the food chain. They may know that birds lay eggs, but are unsure about whether fish do. Most are unfamiliar with the words amphibian and reptile. Some are sure that dragons and unicorns are real animals.
The purpose of this unit is to introduce young children to the five animal classes (mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, reptiles) and invertebrates, to learn to identify animal adaptations, and to form an idea about how or why that adaptation helps that animal to survive in its environment.
They will be introduced to two great naturalists: Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. The students will become animal experts, knowing facts about many different animals, such as animal habitat and diet, predators and prey, and how animals reproduce and care for their young. These junior zoologists will publish and share classroom books about animals, doing research on a focus animal with books and video, and by observing live animals. The students will observe invertebrates in the school garden. They will use the Science Process skills of observe, predict, hypothesize, question, communicate, and investigate as they observe animal adaptations, animal morphology, and animal behavior at the Oakland Zoo. Also, the following animals will visit the room: snake, lizard, salamander, tarantula, gerbil, and bird. Most students are able to verbalize how animals are alike and different from each other. This unit encourages students to use several sources of information to answer questions about their focus animal. The skills that they will acquire are the ability to classify animals by class, to identify adaptations that help animals meet their needs, and form hypotheses about why an animal has that adaptation.
The three activities in this unit are designed to introduce students to the range of biodiversity in the animal world, to encourage students to make connections between the adaptations that they see and the animal's ability to thrive in its environment, and to encourage students to form hypotheses about animal structures and behaviors.
This unit will supplement FOSS Science kits. These are hands on, inquiry based units that teach the Science process skills, and our school has developed Science Notebooks that are used across all grade levels. However, the Life Sciences Kit for our grade is on plants, and there is not any content knowledge on animals. This unit will give them a vast amount of background information about animals.
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