Animal Habitat Inquiry is our Full STEAM Ahead program for grades K-1st. We meet once a week for forty five minutes, and have an end goal usually of a bigger project. For this animal habitat seven week session our end goal is to make our own habitats in a shoe box based on a certain animal that the students pick out 🙂
The set up of the room is that I have tables around the room that are ready for students to have snack at when we first arrive, and we go back to these learning tables when needed but most of this first lesson is at our storytime rug.
Here was the plan for the first week!
On the Storytime Rug
1.) What is a habitat? Discuss with the group and have a brainstorm of what students think they know about habitats. Here is what our chart looks like below. Our chart will be something that we work on for the entire seven weeks so it is a constant work in progress 🙂 Once we learn some new things about habitats through the resources that I will be sharing in these weekly programs we will add to the bottom of this chart !
2.) Once we finished up this discussion we then moved into a fun book that introduced each habitat with beautiful pictures!
3.) What habitats did we see in this book? Let’s make a chart with the habitats and then we can brainstorm what animals we know of now that fall into each habitat. This is a chart we will continue to work on during the entire seven week program session.
4.) Now we moved to the learning tables if wanted, some students stayed on the rug. Whichever place will be a smart choice for them to be able to pay attention. I then brought up on the smart board, explore.org/livecams. This is an awesome website where you can see tons of different animals in their habitats in LIVE action! The only downfall is that sometimes on these live cams is that the animals aren’t there at the moment but they also have some great reels that are of great animal shots that have happened during their previous live sessions that are just as great to watch!
5.) Lastly for the day we began to watch a Brain Pop Jr. Video under habitats about the Ocean habitat. The students were enthralled with this video! We ended on this before the video could end due to time but the kids were excited to finish this up in the next visit together.