Planet Earth Pages
Endangered Species
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!
- What's in Your Home?
- 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.
- Homes and Habitats:
- 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.
- Shoebox Habitat:
- 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.
What's Endangered?
For this activity, you'll need the endangered species list for your area.
These are available free from:
- World Wildlife Fund, 90 Eglinton Avenue E., Suite 504, Toronto, ON, M4P
2Z7, (416) 489-8800; ask for the "Canadian List of Species at Risk."
- COSEWIC, c/o Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada, Ottawa, ON K1A 0H3, (819) 997-4991; ask for the COSEWIC list.
- US Fish and Wildlife Service, Publications Office, 4040 North Fairfax Drive,
Room 130, Arlington, VA 22203; ask for the "Endangered and Threatened Wildlife
and Plants List."
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.
- Natural Regions:
- 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.)
- Council of All Beings:
- 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.
- The Last One:
- 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.
- Poem:
- 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.
- Ecosystem Tags:
- 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.
- Energy Web (Web of Life):
- 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.
Group sculpture:
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.
In my Face:
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.
Developments in the Classroom:
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!
Letter-Writing:
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.
- All about Biodiversity:
- 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. For more information, the The Green School
Biodiversity Booklet offers an inexpensive resource on biodiversity.
It can be obtained by sending a cheque for $5 to <%-2>Ocean Voice
International, Box 37026,<%0> 3332 McCarthy Road, Ottawa, ON, K1V 0W0,
or by phoning the author, Don McAllister, at (613) 264-8986.
- Why Biodiversity?
- Introduce this lesson by sharing a quote by Aldo
Leopold: "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all
the pieces." Ask the students to justify why the preservation of
biodiversity should be important to them. You may wish to brainstorm
answers to this question, writing them on the board; further, you 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:
- animals or plants give us food or clothing
- animals or plants give us medicine (e.g., the Rosy Periwinkle,
once in danger of extinction, was saved when it was found to help cure
leukemia)
- animals or plants offer aesthetic pleasures to humans
- a decrease in genetic diversity means that we would have fewer
strains to use when we try to breed disease- or pest-resistant crops
- plants and animals have an intrinsic right to survive
- Biodiversity Transect:
- Have students conduct a transect
outdoors. Try to make a transect that crosses an area created by humans
(parking lot, playing field, flower border, etc.) and a relatively
intact natural area. Have students in groups examine two meter
square stations along the length of this transect, counting the various
species of plants and animals that are encountered in
order to come up with an quantitative value for the biodiversity of
the area.
Development Simulation:
Craft a
scenario where a local natural area is being threatened by development:
this will allow students to see how decisions that affect biodiversity
are made every day. Have a town hall meeting wherein the
pro-development lobby and the conservationist lobby have to present
their arguments to the municipal council who will be deciding on the
case. Allow students to prepare their presentations through research.
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.