Endangered Animals

Part of our unit on Sharing the Planet involves learning about endangered animals.
This website is a GREAT resource for learning about those animals.


I'm using this graphic organizer for my kiddos.

To show the kids some of the currently endangered animals, I let them see this video, it was neat to show how beautiful all the animals really are!

oil spill

Video made by a child about oil spills (5 minutes)
BP Oil Spill (4 minutes)
Washing a bird (2 minutes)


I read this book by Melvin Berger. It's a great resource and explains very clearly what happens and what people do to save the animals.





Then we did our own oil spill experiment where we had to figure out what the best tool would be to remove oil from water.
We used: cotton balls, Popsicle sticks, Q-tips, paper towels, eye droppers, rocks

We started off by making a prediction about what would work BEST to clean the oil spill, and we kept a chart of our data. 

PYP Sharing the Planet

I love The Giving Tree. For those of you who don't have your own copy... there's a really nice narration on youtube.
There's also a 25 minute video of The Lorax, which I didn't watch because it was so long but next indoor recess, that's definitely what we'll watch!

Check out our videos about natural resources.

Today we talked about the renewable resource, WATER.

Here's the adorable water song that I love:

The Water Cycle – Sung to the tune of O’ My Darling

Evaporation

Condensation

Precipitation on my head

Accumulation

Water Cycle………………

Now I start it all again!

Appropriately, today has been rainy so I'm thinking that for indoor recess, we need to watch the Magic School Bus episode "Wet All Over"

Here's an adorable little Tree poem.

Trees

by Harry Behn

Trees are the kindest things I know,
They do no harm, they simply grow
And spread a shade for sleepy cows,
And gather birds among their bows.

They give us fruit in leaves above,
And wood to make our houses of,
And leaves to burn on Halloween
And in the Spring new buds of green.

They are first when day's begun
To tough the beams of morning sun,
They are the last to hold the light
When evening changes into night.

And when a moon floats on the sky
They hum a drowsy lullaby
Of sleepy children long ago...
Trees are the kindest things I know.

Mason Moves Away is a great resource for talking about environment changes.

PYP Sharing the Planet

Our new unit for PYP (The IB program) is:
Sharing the Planet.

Our central idea is: Living things share natural resources. 

The first activity I did was to hand out a snack to only some of my students. The ones that I skipped were left saying, "What about me!?"
Then we talked about how that felt (and I gave everyone snack).

We defined our our words.
Resource- something you can use
Natural resource- from nature
Manmade resource- humans made or changed it.

We wrote examples of natural resources and manmade resources on sticky notes and talked about the difference.

We watched a video from United Streaming called Learning About Natural Resources. 

This video explained the difference between 3 types of natural resources.

Inexhaustible Natural Resource- Cannot be used up, will always be available (air, sun)

Renewable Natural Resource- Can be used over and over again (trees, soil)

Nonrenewable Natural Resource- Cannot be made again in our lifetime (coal, gas)

Here's a little youtube video talking about the difference between man made and natural resources. 

This is a great article about the causes and effects of pollution. 


Video about the 3R's.


Video about pollution.

Here's a good website for suggestions of activities go to along with the Berenstein Bears book about pollution.

Here's another website about pollution.