Animal Units

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Archive : 2002 : January : 30

Animal Units
By heidi

I have been doing the animal units in my classroom for 10 year and have a wonderful unit. The first thing you do is have the students choose an animal to research. I have alway stuck with vertebrates as it was one of our
standards, but it would work with invertebrates as well. Then I took a regular white piece of paper and divided it into 4ths. In each square, I have a list of questions they are to find answers to when researching. Ex: Square one might have Name of animal_____________ Size____________
Weight_________________ Color_______________ Etc.. So square 1 would be the name and description

of the animal, 2 would be about the babies, 3 would be about their habitat, and 4 would be unusual features. You can include what ever you like. I would love to send you a copy of mine. Then you have the kids write a 4 paragraph paper using the info in the squares. square 1 is paragraph 1, etc... This really helps get away from copying. Next, the students locate 2 pictures from books if they can and draw and color using chalk a pic. This all goes on a piece of tagboard labeled with their animal at the top. I've also included a food chain/web some years as a picture they have to draw. I've also done this project in pairs and individually. It is a great thing to have hanging during conferences or have an animal fair. I also have the students give an oral report to the class. I could go on forever. I hope this helps. I don't have it in front of me, so if you still need to know what to include, I'll write more later.