by Gareth Thomson
This issue's Planet Earth Pages feature activities that focus on local endangered species. Most animals become endangered not because of hunting or poaching but because they lose their homes. For this reason, the twin themes of endangered species and habitat protection are interwoven throughout the Planet Earth pages. Taking action is emphasized at every grade level: this not only directly helps the animal or habitat being studies, but also provides students with valuable action-oriented citizenship skills.
The Planet Earth pages are divided into four age categories, but there may well be a suitable activity in one of the adjacent age categories that can be adapted to your class. Have a look and judge for yourself!
Discuss with students what their basic needs are. The basic needs of all living organisms are food, shelter and water. Have the students draw a picture of their home, showing where food, water and shelter are available. Tell students that if their home loses any one of these things (for example, if there were no more food), then they wouldn't be able to live in their homes any more.
Have students choose a common animal that they like. Help them to identify the food, water and shelter that this animal needs to find in its home. Ask them to draw a picture showing these features and to post this drawing beside the one they made in "What's in Your Home?" to show them how much they have in common with the animal they draw. The term used to describe an animal's home is habitat; ask the students to label their diagrams accordingly.
This activity echoes "Homes and Habitats" (above); have students create a 3-D diorama inside of a shoebox (or larger box). Use modeling clay to create the animal's home, and building materials such as cotton wool, construction paper and pipe cleaners to represent the basic needs of the animal. Label the diorama "My animal's habitat."
Most animals become endangered because they lose their houses. Read the Dr. Seuss story The Lorax to the students: this helps them to realize the difficult position that animals are put into when, as in this story, all of the Truffula trees are cut down.
Go through the list with your students. Scientists have created different categories to reflect the fact that although all animals on the list are "at risk," some are more in danger of extinction than others. For each category, have students find an animal in your area.
Research with your students to find out what natural region your school is located in. Once you know this, you'll have a fairly good idea of what plant and animal communities lived in this area before any human development occurred. Have the students list the ways in which humans have changed the area. Ask them what happened to the many animals that used to live in this area before being displaced by human development. (These animals lost their homes, moved away, and either found a new home or died through not being able to meet their needs.)
Hold a Council of All Beings. This role playing activity allows for an empathetic understanding of the role of different animals. Students make a mask of an animal they would like to represent. Masks can be constructed of papier-mâché or construction paper and decorated with natural materials. Students then don their masks, assume the identity of the animals, and in a Council of All Beings, describe their lives and the difficulties they face in meeting their needs. You may wish to include in the role play e human who plays a passive listening role. You may also wish to have the animals comment on the anxiety they feel about human development taking away their homes.
Have the students write a story that casts them in the role of a human watching the very last member of a soon to be extinct species of animal. In addition to describing the animal's movements, have students describe the thoughts and emotions that they themselves are feeling.
Have the students choose an endangered
species or simply an animal that they care about. Print
the letters of its name vertically on a page; beside each
letter write a line of a poem about that animal. For
example:
Dancing
Effortlessly around green meadow
Endlessly scanning for danger-- then,
Running like the wind.
Have students prepare a number of 5 cm square cards with a labeled drawing of a living or non-living thing from a forest ecosystem: examples include a rock, sun, tree, flower, bee, ant, woodpecker, deer, coyote, human. You may wish to laminate these cards to ensure their longevity. Next, have students put a strip of masking tape on the back of their ecosystem tag and affix their tag to the forehead of another student without them seeing what it is. The students then have to mingle with their peers to guess what feature is on their forehead sign. You may wish to allow them each only two guesses; other techniques include allowing sign language only, or permitting students to ask only questions that can be answered by a yes or a no. The game ends when everyone identifies their ecosystem tag; debrief with the students to ensure that they understand the role of their tag in the ecosystem.
This activity is designed to immediately follow Ecosystem Tags. Students sit in a circle on the floor in group of 10-15. Starting arbitrarily with one student, ask them to roll a ball of twine across the floor to another character that they either give energy to or get energy from (for example, a snowshoe hare could roll it to a coyote or to a blade of grass). Have the students justify their decisions to the group as they roll the string. Continue the activity until all of the characters are connected by the ball of string; point out that this "web of life" is an accurate analogy to the invisible web that connects all living and non-living components of an ecosystem. Then start to show how changes to any one part of the ecosystem soon affect the other parts. In our example of the snowshoe hare, ask the students to pretend that humans have come into the forest and hunted almost all the snowshoe hares. To reflect this, first have the students take up all the slack in the string; then have the snowshoe hare drop its string, and ask the other participants if they felt a change in the tension. Both the grass and the coyote will immediately feel this. A decrease in the number of hares is bad for the coyote, who relies on hares as food, but good for the grass, which can now grow profusely. Have these affected characters in turn drop their string, and observe how the "snowshoe hare effect" rapidly spreads throughout the ecosystem.
This activity is designed to immediately follow the Web of Life activity. Keep the students in the groups formed for the Web of Life activity, and ask them to create a group sculpture, using only their bodies, that visually represents the relationships of these animals to each other (as an example, a tree would stand with its arms outstretched; a leaf-eating insect might be crouched in a predatory manner over one of the tree's leaves, while an insect-eating bird, in turn, would be preparing to seize the insect in its beak). Have the groups present their sculptures to the class; you may wish to ask one of the students to interpret the sculpture to the audience.
A limiting factor for many animals is their psychological need for space: animals such as wolves or grizzly bears will abandon acceptable habitat because they cannot meet their need for adequate space. Have the students get into pairs, and ask them to stand facing each other as they discuss the answer to the following question: "Why do animals need space?" After a minute, tell the students to freeze, and ask them to estimate how far apart their feet are from each other. Next, ask them to move closer so that their feet are only half as far apart (alternatively, ask them to stand so that their toes are touching) and to resume their conversation. This may be a little disconcerting to the students! In the discussion that follows ask the students if they, too, have a psychological need for space. Being crowded into a smaller area than we are used to increases our stress level.
Cordon off half of the classroom before the students arrive; you may wish to put up a large and enigmatic sign that simply states "This area slated for development." Have the students find a new place in the now-crowded half of the classroom, and ask them to comment on the situation. This is exactly analogous to what happens when animals lose habitat due to development: they cannot tolerate the higher stress that results, and usually travel in search of new territory which they don't usually find!
Many endangered animals can be saved by prompt action by decision-makers. Have students write a letter to a decision-maker in support of an animal that they have researched. The letter should stress the importance of habitat preservation.
The activities for Grades 10 to 12 focus on biodiversity, a concept that is closely linked to endangered species and habitat preservation: the extinction of a species decreases the earth's biodiversity, while the preservation of habitat automatically helps to preserve the biodiversity of the living things that use that habitat.
Introduce your students to the concept of biodiversity: biodiversity is the variety of life found on earth There are estimated to be between 10 million and 100 million species of life on earth, many of which have yet to be discovered. There are four types of biodiversity: genetic biodiversity, taxonomic biodiversity, ecological biodiversity, and functional biodiversity.
may find it useful to divide this list of reasons into two categories: reasons to do with use by humans, and reasons that have nothing to do with humans. Have the students come up with variations of the following:
Gareth Thomson is a regional editor of Green Teacher and a program developer at the Kananaskis Country Environmental Literacy Program in Canmore, Alberta.
Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank Judy Archer of the Calgary Zoo for her help with initial concepts. Some of the concepts behind the K-6 activities are derived from Going, Going, Gone? A Guide to Teaching about Species at Risk and Habitat Conservation, a resource for grades 3-7, produced by the Kananaskis Country Environmental Literacy Program. To obtain a free copy, contact: Kananaskis Country Environmental Literacy Program, Box 280, Canmore, AB, T0L 0M0, (403) 678-5508.
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