The Bones About It: The Animal Kingdom - Vertebrates

Each of these six classes are designed to last 45 minutes but may be up to ten minutes shorter or longer depending on class size and students' interest in verbal participation.

Week 2-6 suggest supplies that the students can use to complete a demonstration in order to better understand a certain feature of the week's vertebrate class. 

No background knowledge is required, but a decent understanding of following activity instructions and spelling patterns is helpful. 

Some classes may use printables, such as graphic organizers, pictures, exit tickets, or information sheets. A set of class printables will be made available to the parents through email/on the classroom page a few days before class begins. Please print these pages and place them, in order, in a ringed binder or folder for your student(s).

Each student will be included in the discussions during each class. Student input in highly valued. Students should come to class ready to be respectful of their classmates, by waiting their turn, raising their hands verses interrupting, and using kind language when responding. 

The teaching style for these classes is a combination of students using images to self-discover attributes of the various vertebrate classes, direct instruction from the teacher to fill in gaps and offer interesting or needed details, and hands on demonstrations. 

During the first week of learning, students will be presented with various animal images and asked to separate them into two groups. They will then determine the differences in the groups. One difference being skeletons, and more specifically a back bone. The animals chosen by the students as having a backbone will be shown again and labeled as vertebrates. Students will then take the same images an separate them any way they see fit. This will eventually lead, either naturally or through guiding questions from the teacher, to the students separating the vertebrate animals into five groups - fish, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. They will determine and discuss the criteria they used to sort the animals into these groups. They will also contrast the different classes against one another and make arguments for why specific animals from one class could not be placed into another class. 

During the second week, students will discover more about the fish class. They will make specific observations about fish in general and will use images to differentiate between the three major superclasses of fish: bony fish, cartilaginous fish, and jawless fish. Students will also be instructed in some of the key features of each of these superclasses of fish. To help understand the buoyancy of fish, students will do a simple demonstrations of density. For this demonstrations, students needs a bathroom tissue cardboard tube, a marker, three pennies, tape, a large bowl, water for the bowl, a small balloon, a ziplock sandwich baggie, and a about a half cup of cooking oil. 

The third week will have students looking into the reptile class. Students will use images to make observations about this class of animals, both physically and behaviorlly. Students will use these observations to determine a set of criteria for this class. They will then organize the reptiles shown into groups they feel are most appropriate bases on characteristics. Then some details will be given about a certain order of reptile and the students will determine which of their groups fits that description. The same will be done with the other two reptile groups. Students will do a very simple molting demonstration using glue on their hands. 

The fourth week will allow students an opportunity to discover what the defining attributes of amphibians are. They will use their observations and understanding to compare and contrast amphibians and reptiles. They will hear descriptions of the different orders of amphibians and choose images of the amphibians they feel best match those descriptions and give their deciding factors. Since we will learn that amphibians, like frogs are exothermic and need heat, I will ask the students why some frogs don't freeze in the winter. To demonstrate this quirky hibernation trick students will pull out previously prepared water and maple syrup that they placed in the freezer the day before. 

During the fifth week, students will use visuals to determine what makes birds similar and different to other vertebrates, and decide what criteria an animal must meet to be classified as a bird. The students will be asked to detail how they think it is that birds are able to fly so well. Any gaps will be filled in with instruction, including how fast moving air causes less air pressure and that is exactly what happens above a bird as it flies. To help demonstrate this students will use 2 cardboard tubes and a straw to create fast and slow moving air and see the forces each has on the tubes. 

During the sixth and final week, students will delve into the mammal class and use images to determine the criteria they feel qualify a vertebrate to belong in the mammal group. They will then look at some mammal mothers and compare and contrast their child bearing abilities. The students will separate the mammal mothers into three different groups and describe how each of these mammals produces young. The class will then look at marine mammals and decide what they would need in order to survive in the water as mammals. Since mammals are warm blooded, being able to stay warm in cold water would be one need. To demonstrate how blubber works, students will need a good amount of lard, two quart or larger baggies, a large bowl, ice, two rubber bands, and water.