Skip to main content

Amazing Animals Presentation at Zion National Park





I visited my family this past week and took my neice (age 7) to Zion National Park in Utah to work on her Junior Ranger Badge. As part of the requirements she had to attend a ranger led program and we opted for the Amazing Animals talk about bears.

I got a little nervous when Ranger Colton put the vocabulary words on the board (see first picture) but I thought he did a great job of explaining what each of them meant and getting input from the children. I also liked his graph representing the diet of the black bear - shading in 70% for plants, 20% for water creatures, and 10% for large game (see the board in the last picture). He had a bear skin and talked about the adaptations they had for being successful in their environment - claws, fur, and teeth that were both flat and pointed for grinding plants and chewing meat.

The program was 45 minutes long and he had children go outside to participate in an activity where they became black bears and had to get resources in order to go into torpor. The resources were different colored poker chips on the ground which were worth a certain number of points (parents...or in my case Aunts held a plastic dixie cup while the kids had 1 minute to collect their resources - one at a time and drop them in the cup. Then the children (with or without the parents help) had to calculate the points they earned gathering resources. If they earned at least 60 points they were ready to go into torpor (most of the kids were successful). Next he had all the kids become wounded bears and they repeated the activity but they had to hop on one leg to collect their resources (only a few children got the necessary points for torpor).

I thought this was an excellent lesson for many reasons -

- He had an actual animal carcass the kids could handle
- He started with a true story of a black bear encounter in the park (and held up laminated pictures while he told the story to capture children's interest)
- He had a graph on the board plus the vocabulary words he was going to use
- The activity involved children going outside and being active
- There was a math componet with the graphing and points calculation

My neice just turned seven so her attention span and retention ability is not the strongest but she was able to recall some of what she learned (bears have 2-3 cubs, they have five fingers and toes, they eat plants and meat). The age group (and nationality) of the children ranged from 12 to 4 (which made the teaching challenging but children got out of it what their age allowed - older kids retained the vocabulary better while younger kids were more apt to remember feeling the claws on the bear carcass).

I definitely filed that lesson away for use in grades that talk about animal adaptations (in our case third grade).

Comments

Anthony said…
Hello,

My name is Anthony Capps and I recently graduate from the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

Thank you for sharing this. I can easily see how it could be modified for classroom use. I am about to begin my first year as a third grade teacher. Your blog has been such a valuable resource to help me get started.

Thank again!

Anthony
The Queen Bee said…
I am going to Zion this week-end! I hope my son (10) can get in on this!!! I too am visiting family, as I live in florida and we don't have real rocks here! LOL
~Natalie
Wendy said…
Sounds like a lesson straight out of the book "Project Wild." Great resource for hands on science. Thanks for your post. Loving your blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Rock Cycle Activity

Today I got to spend the day with a 3rd grade science teacher doing a rock cycle activity. She had asked for help a couple of weekends ago to find some engaging rock cycle activities for her students. I quickly did a Pinterest search and came up with a link to a middle school blog where they featured a fun looking rock cycle station activity. That website took me to the originating activity site - Illinois State Museum Geology Online and their Ride the Rock Cycle activity . I read through it and felt it was doable for third graders (although I was a little nervous about the cartooning). I offered my help and we put together the activity. The kids did it WONDERFULLY. It was one of those lesson you wish was observed (but of course never is :) They are on an alternating science schedule so she only had two of the four classes today but it was a good sampling of children. She had one class that had a high portion of struggling learners and the second class had a high