Earth Rangers Lessons: Primary JUMPMath€¦ · developed books and teacher’s guides covering the...

ContentsLesson 1: Classification in Geometry

Lesson 2: Classification in Biology

Lesson 3: Applying the Mathematics of Food Webs

BLM 1: Introductory Shape Game

BLM 2: 2-D Shape Sorting Game

BLM 3: Animal and Plant Cards

BLM 4: A Food Web

JUMPMathEarth Rangers Lessons: Primary

Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, or expressly indicated on the page with the inclusion of a copyright notice.

JUMP MathToronto, Ontariowww.jumpmath.org

Funding for these lessons was provided by Earth Rangers (www.earthrangers.ca).

Lesson 1: Classification in Geometry (Primary) Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1

Teacher’s Guide: Primary level

Lesson 1: Classifi cation in Geometry

Introduction

Mathematicians and biologists study very different things. Mathematicians study numbers, patterns, and shapes, while biologists study plants and animals. But mathematicians and biologists both need to know how to sort and classify things, because it helps them understand how the things they study are related and how they work and are put together. And numbers, patterns, and shapes are present everywhere in nature, even in living things. So when you study the natural world, you end up using and discovering a great deal of mathematics.

Tell your students that in the next three lessons they will play a game called “What am I?” In this game they must act like detectives and try to fi nd answers to various problems by asking the least number of questions possible. By playing the game, students will see how sorting and classifying things in a clever way can help them ask good questions when they are trying to solve a puzzle or a mystery. They will also see how mathematics is present everywhere in nature, and they will learn (in Lesson 3) how they can use their knowledge to help protect the environment.

Warm-up Game

BA C D HG I J

Cut out shapes A, B, C, D, G, H, I, and J on Blackline Master (BLM) 1: Introductory Shape Game (Primary) and post them on the board using sticky-tack or tape. Tell your students that you are thinking about one of the shapes. They must fi nd out what shape you are thinking of by asking you questions, but you will only answer “Yes” or “No.” The goal of the game is to identify the shape by asking the least number of questions. (You might let one student at a time ask questions until they have found the answer, or you might allow students to take turns asking questions.) Students are not allowed to say the letter printed on the shape: they must identify the shape using descriptions.

Play the game several times, keeping track of how many questions your students have to ask each time. Students should see that if they ask questions that are very specifi c, such as “Are you thinking of a small shaded square?”, they may have to ask many questions before they learn the answer. (As there are eight shapes, they might need to ask as many as seven questions this way.)

Ask your students whether they have a strategy for playing the game. Can they always fi nd the answer by asking a certain number of questions? Students should see that they only need to ask three questions. The fi rst question, for instance, might tell them the shape (“Is the shape a square?”), the second the size (“Is the shape small?”), and the third the shading (“Is the shape grey?” or “Is the shape shaded?”). Ask your students whether it makes any difference in what order they ask the questions, and whether they would be certain to get the answer in three questions if they just guessed the shape at random. (No, it might take seven questions.)

As students eliminate possibilities by asking questions, you might remove the shapes that have been eliminated from the board, to make it easier for students to focus on the remaining shapes. You might also ask students to help you identify the shapes that have been eliminated by a particular question.

What am I? A Game Connecting Mathematics and the Environment by John Mighton, Founder of JUMP Math


Research in psychology has shown that students’ brains work far more effi ciently if they are confi dent and engaged. One way to build confi dence is to “raise the bar” incrementally by asking students a series of questions that appear to be harder and harder but that do not require any new skills or knowledge to answer. If some of your students are lacking confi dence, you might give them a chance to show off by playing the game with all sixteen shapes (from A to L) on BLM 1. Make a big deal of the fact that they can play the game with so many shapes. The sorting categories for all sixteen shapes are shaded/unshaded, large/small, and square/circle/triangle.

The Shape GamePlace a selection of the shape cards from BLM 2: Shape Sorting Game (Primary) on the board and ask students to discuss what properties they might use to sort the shapes. You might have students work in groups, each with a set of shape cards. You might also give them rulers (to measure the sides of the shapes).

When students think about how they would sort the shapes, they might consider the following sorts of questions:

Is the shape shaded or unshaded?How many corners (or vertices) does the shape have?How many sides does the shape have?Are the sides all straight or are some sides curved?Does the shape have any square corners (right angles)? If so, how many?Is the shape equilateral (that is, are all sides of the same length)?

If your students are not able to describe the shapes using geometric terms, you might review the following terms:

The sides of a shape are the lines that form the boundary of the shape.

A vertex is a point where two sides of a fi gure meet.

A square corner or right angle is an angle of the type found at the corner of a square.

A shape is equilateral if all of its sides are of the same length.

A shape with three straight sides is a triangle, four sides a quadrilateral, fi ve sides a pentagon, and six sides a hexagon.

Some quadrilaterals have special names. A square has four equal sides and four right angles. A rectangle has opposite sides that are equal and four right angles. A rhombus has four equal sides but not necessarily any right angles. Shape R is a rhombus, and so is shape F (a square).

Below is a series of games of increasing diffi culty that can be played with the geometric shapes on BLM 2. You should pick the games that suit your students. Post the shapes in each game on the board and play the game exactly as you played the warm-up game. You might allow students to come to the board and lead the game by picking a selection of shapes and asking their fellow students to guess the shape they are thinking of. Students might sort the shapes in many different ways, but in each game it is possible to identify any shape by asking just two or three questions. For each game there are some suggested sorting attributes that students might use to sort the shapes.

Game 1

Shapes: B, F, J, N

FB J N


Sorting Attributes: Students might sort the shapes using the following attributes: shaded/unshaded; 3 sides/4 sides or 3 vertices (or corners)/4 vertices (or corners) or triangle/square.

Game 2

Shapes: B, C, J, KSorting Attributes: shaded/unshaded; straight sides/curved sides

Game 3

Shapes: F, H, N, PSorting Attributes: shaded/unshaded; square/rectangle or equilateral/not equilateral

Game 4

Shapes: A, B, F, HSorting Attributes: 3 sides/4 sides or square/triangle; equilateral/not equilateral

Game 5

Shapes: A, B, F, H, I, J, N, PSorting Attributes: shaded/unshaded; 3 sides/4 sides; equilateral/not equilateral

Game 6

Shapes: E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P

NG HFE POM

Sorting Attributes: shaded/unshaded; straight sides/curved sides; square/rectangle for one set of shapes and 1 curved side/2 curved sides for the other set

Game 7

Shapes: All 16 shapes from A to PSorting Attributes: shaded/unshaded; straight sides/curved sides; 3 sides (or vertices)/4 sides (or vertices); equilateral/not equilateral for one set of shapes and 1 curved side/2 curved sides for the other set

Game 8

Shapes: F, H, T, USorting Attributes: quadrilateral/pentagon or 4 sides/5 sides or 4 vertices/5vertices; equilateral/not equilateral

Game 9

Shapes: A, B, F, H, W, XSorting Attributes: triangle/quadrilateral/hexagon or 3 sides/4 sides/6 sides or 3 vertices/4 vertices/6 vertices; equilateral/not equilateral

Game 10

Shapes: A, B, F, R, T, VSorting Attributes: triangle/quadrilateral/hexagon or 3 sides/4 sides/6 sides or 3 vertices/4 vertices/6 vertices; at least one square corner/no square corners


Note: You might have students play the game with several random selections of shapes so that they can see that there are cases where the sorting rules do not divide the shapes into groups of equal size.

If you have an older primary class and you think that they would enjoy more challenging activities, see the Junior version of this lesson plan.

JUMP Math is a charity dedicated to supporting teachers in the teaching of mathematics. JUMP has developed books and teacher’s guides covering the curriculum from grades 1 to 8. JUMP also provides professional development for teachers. See the website www.jumpmath.org for details. JUMP would like to thank the artist Roger Hall (www.wildlife-artworks.com) for donating the use of his animal illustrations for these lessons.

Lesson 2: Classification in Biology (Primary) Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1



Lesson 2: Classifi cation in Biology

Introduction

In the last lesson your students learned how to sort shapes according to their geometric properties. In this lesson they will learn how biologists sort animals according to what they eat (or where they derive their energy). Knowing which animals and plants a particular animal depends on to survive can help scientists protect the animal and make sure that it is not harmed by human activities.

A food chain or food web is a diagram that shows which plants or animals are eaten by the animals in a particular habitat. There is a great deal of interesting mathematics in a food web, and understanding this mathematics will allow your students to understand in-depth how pollution, loss of habitat, and climate change harm plants and animals.

Tell your students that since they are now all experts at asking good questions to solve a puzzle, you will give them a chance to solve some puzzles about nature. Solving these puzzles will help them learn to think like scientists. And when they can think like scientists, they will be able to fi nd out for themselves how their actions affect the environment, and they will see how much power they have to protect the plants and animals of the world.

Food Chains and Food Webs

As a warm-up activity, post a selection of animal cards from BLM 3: Animal and Plant Cards on the board and ask your students to discuss how they might sort the animals. In thinking about the properties of the animals, students might ask the following sorts of questions:

Does the animal have legs? If so, how many?Does the animal have wings? If so, how many?How does the animal move? Does it run, crawl, swim, or fl y?Where does the animal live?What type of body covering does it have?

After your students have had a chance to discuss these questions, remind them of one thing that all animals have in common: they must eat food to survive. Food gives animals the energy they need to grow, move, and reproduce.

Biologists are scientists who study animals and plants. Biologists can learn a great deal about an animal by fi nding out what kinds of things it eats.

Place the following animal cards on the board and draw arrows between them as shown:

Tree Caterpillar Robin Great Horned Owl

(Note: In the diagram the animal names are arranged horizontally to save space. But you should place the cards on the board in a column, vertically, with the plant at the bottom. The cards are fairly small so you can create food chains that have a number of animals in them. Students at the back of the classroom may not be able to read the labels on the cards, but they should be able to recognize the animal on a card by its silhouette. To help students recognize the cards from a distance, let them see them up close fi rst so they can become familiar with the names of the animals. You might want to laminate the cards so they are easier to use, and so you can reuse them.)


Tell your students that the diagram you created is called a food chain. A food chain shows which plants or animals are eaten by the various animals in a habitat. In a food chain, the arrows always point from the food to the animal that eats the food. Leave the food chain on the board while your students help you with the following activity.

Place the cards below on the board in the order shown. Ask your students if they can arrange the cards in a column and create a food chain by drawing arrows to show which animals eat which food.

Question 2: Duck Grasses Snowy OwlAnswer: Grasses Duck Snowy Owl

Question 1: Mouse Berry Bush Barn OwlAnswer: Berry Bush Mouse Barn Owl

Ask your students whether the three food chains have anything in common. Students might notice that each chain starts with a plant and ends with an owl. Tell your students that many food chains end with animals that are not owls but very few start with an animal rather than a plant. Ask your students whether there could be a food chain where an animal is at the bottom and a plant appears above an animal. Your students may be surprised to learn that plants do sometimes eat animals! The venus fl y trap, for instance, eats insects by trapping them in leaves that have long spines along their edges that form a cage when the leaf closes. Once the insect is trapped, the leaf releases a chemical that dissolves the insect, thus allowing the plant to digest its prey. (Students might do a research project on the types of plants that eat animals.)

Tell your students that you put an owl at the top of each food chain for a reason. Scientists can learn a great deal about a habitat (a habitat is a place where animals live) by studying what owls eat. Owls eat a great variety of small animals, including insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals like mice and rabbits. Since owls don’t have teeth, they can’t chew their food the way we chew ours. Most birds that eat animals larger than insects, like hawks, shred their prey with their beaks, because this helps them digest the food. But some owls, like the barn owl, don’t even do this: they swallow their prey whole! This means that owls usually digest less of what they eat than other birds. They regurgitate the parts of their prey they can’t digest in balls called “owl pellets.” If you pull open an owl pellet, you can sometimes fi nd the entire skeleton of a mouse or a shrew inside. Because owls eat so many different kinds of animals, scientists can get a good idea of the types and numbers of animals that live in a particular habitat by examining the owl pellets.

Owls are amazing hunters. The barn owl, for instance, has special feathers that reduce the noise it makes when it fl ies so it can hover silently above its prey. It also has extremely acute hearing so it can hunt in the dark just by listening for the movements of its prey. (You might encourage your students to do a research project on owls and their importance in their habitats.)

Ask your students if they think they can put together some food chains that are even longer than the ones that they previously tried. Can they put together a food chain that is four cards long? Or fi ve long? (Don’t underestimate how excited your students will become if you make it sound like creating longer and longer food chains is a great challenge. And give weaker students a chance to show off with these activities. Research in psychology has shown that the brain only works effi ciently when it is excited and engaged. Also, children need a great deal of practice to solidify concepts, so they enjoy practice more than adults. Don’t be afraid to repeat similar activities in this lesson, giving lots of students a chance to participate.)

Mix up the cards shown below and have students put them in order vertically, with arrows between.

Tree Caterpillar Frog Barn Owl

Grasses Grasshopper Mouse Snowy Owl

Berry Bush Mouse Snake Great Horned Owl

Flower Butterfl y Dragonfl y Duck Snowy Owl


Biologists call plants “producers” because they absorb the energy of the sun and store it in a form that animals can digest. Animals are called “consumers” because they use up or consume the energy that is stored in plants. In a food chain you can usually fi nd two types of animals: animals that only eat plants, which are called herbivores; and animals that eat other animals, which are called carnivores. Since carnivores depend on herbivores to survive and herbivores eat plants, all animals (including humans) depend on plants to survive. That is why it is so important to protect the forests, meadows, and grasslands of the world and why it is important to grow plants in a way that doesn’t harm the environment.

Ask your students to identify the producers and consumers and the herbivores and carnivores in the food chains that they made.

After your students have practised making food chains, draw their attention to the fi rst food chain that you made for the great horned owl. Tell them that you are going to create a more complicated structure called a food web by adding animals to the food chain. Place the frog card on the board. Tell your students that there is an animal in the food chain that is eaten by the frog. Can they guess what it is? (The caterpillar.) Add an arrow from the caterpillar to the frog. Then place the snake card on the board and add arrows to show that the frog is eaten by the snake and the snake by the owl (as shown in Figure 1). A diagram that includes several food chains is called a food web.

Place the mouse card on the board (between the frog and the robin) and ask how it might fi t into the food web, and then repeat this exercise with the mink. The resulting food web is shown in Figure 2.

Great Horned Owl

Tree

Caterpillar

RobinFrog

Snake

Figure 1

Great Horned Owl

Tree

Caterpillar

MouseFrog

Snake

Figure 2

Robin

Mink

Tell your students that there is a great deal of interesting mathematics in the food web. Ask: What does the number of arrows that point away from a particular animal tell you? (How many animals in the web eat the animal.) What does the number of arrow that point to the animal tell you? (How many animals are eaten by the animal.) How many animals eat the caterpillar? (Three.) How many animals are eaten by the great horned owl? (Three.) Which two animals are eaten by the most animals? (The caterpillar and the mouse are both eaten by three animals.) Ask a number of questions of this sort to give students a chance to demonstrate their understanding of the web. Note: If you feel that the food web in Figure 2 is too complex for your students, don’t include the mink, or add it after students have practised with the simpler web.

Knowing how many arrows point to and away from an animal in a food web can tell you how important the animal is in a habitat. An animal with many arrows pointing away from it provides food for many other animals. And an animal with many arrows pointing towards it can perform an important function by controlling populations of animals that might otherwise become too numerous and destroy the habitat. Caterpillars, for instance, would kill a great many trees if they weren’t eaten by the animals that are directly above them in the web. (Ask your students which animals in the web keep the population of caterpillars in check.) But caterpillars are important themselves as they provide food directly or indirectly for so many other animals. In a natural habitat, all of the animals and plants play a role in maintaining the health of the habitat.

Another important mathematical feature of a food web is called a “path.” To fi nd a path, start at one of the organisms on the web and move along any arrow in the direction in which it points. (You are not allowed to move backwards along an arrow; all paths lead upwards.) If you follow a set of one or more arrows in a row, you will have found a path in the web. Ask a student to come to the board and show you a path from the


tree to the great horned owl. If they can reach, the student should put their fi nger on each animal or plant and say its name out loud as they move along the path. Ask another student to fi nd a different path from the tree to the great horned owl. (Paths are considered different as long as one of the paths has at least one different organism on it, so paths that are different may still overlap. For instance, “tree, caterpillar, mouse, great horned owl” and “tree, caterpillar, mouse, mink, great horned owl” are different paths.) Bonus: How many paths are there from the tree to the great horned owl altogether? (There are fi ve; can you fi nd them all?)

The length of a path is the number of organisms you encounter as you move along the path. For instance the path “caterpillar, robin, mink” has length 3, since there are 3 animals along the path. Ask students to count the length of several paths on the web. Then ask: How long is the longest path from the tree to the great horned owl? (There are four paths of length 5; for instance, tree, caterpillar, mouse, mink, great horned owl.) How long is the shortest path? (There is one path of length 4; tree, frog, snake, great horned owl.)

Ask your students to think about how paths might be important in a food web. If you follow all the paths that lead upwards from an organism, you will fi nd all the animals that depend on the organism to survive. How many animals in the web depend on the mouse? (Three.) How many depend on the frog? (Two: the snake and the great horned owl.) What animal do all the other animals depend on? (The caterpillar.) What plant do all the animals depend on? (The tree.) You might point out to your students that the relations of interdependence in a habitat are even more complex than those they can see from the web. For instance, plants also depend on animals to survive: fl owers, for instance, depend on bees to spread their pollen, and trees depend on animals like squirrels and chipmunks to spread their cones, nuts, and seeds.

From the web, students can begin to see how human activities affect the environment. They can see, for instance, how many animals are harmed when trees are cut down. They can also see how pollution and poisons spread through a habitat. Farmers spray pesticides on crops to control insects like caterpillars and grasshoppers. The chemicals in pesticides are stored directly in the body of an animal that eats the pesticide, but they are also stored in the body of a second animal that eats the fi rst, and in the body of a third animal that eats the second, and so on. So the chemicals in pesticides, which can be harmful to humans as well as animals, work their way upward along any paths in the web. How many animals in the web are affected if a caterpillar eats the leaves from a tree that has been sprayed with pesticides? Your students should see that all of the animals are affected, because all of them can be reached from some path that starts from the caterpillar!

End the lesson by playing the game from the previous lesson but using the animal cards rather than the shape cards. Put a selection of animal cards on the board, arranged in a food web, and ask students to identify the animal you are thinking of by asking questions. Students should ask questions that are based on the food web and on the terms and concepts they learned in the lesson. For instance, if you use the food web for the great horned owl from Figure 2, they might ask: Are you thinking of a producer? A consumer? A herbivore? A carnivore? An animal that you can reach on a path from a robin? An animal that is eaten by three other animals? And so on.

As a warm-up game you might try using the food web below. One way to get to the answer quickly is to ask, “Are you thinking of a herbivore?” and then, if the answer is yes, “Are eaten by a wolf?” and, if the answer is no, “Are you a producer?”

Grasses

DeerGrasshopper

Figure 3

Wolf

Tell your students that now that they understand some of the mathematics of food webs, they are ready to start applying their knowledge. In the next lesson they will revisit some ideas about food webs and learn about some activities they can do at home and at school to help protect the plants and animals that live in the same part of the world that they do.

Lesson 3: Applying the Mathematics of Food Webs (Primary) Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1



Lesson 3: Applying the Mathematics of Food Webs

Introduction

In this lesson your students will apply their knowledge of food webs to the environment. They will learn about the importance of water in food webs and about the problems people can cause for animals when they use water wastefully. They will also conduct a simple experiment to determine how much water they can save by being more careful about the way they use water at home and at school.

For this lesson you will need to review skip counting by fi ves and tens. An older primary class might also review skip counting by fi fties and hundreds.

The Importance of Water in Food Webs

All animals and plants need water to survive. In many food webs the most important animals live directly in or on water. Tell your students that you are going to make an owl food web that contains a number of animals that live in or on water. Place the snowy owl card at the top of the board and place the grasses, mouse, and grasshopper cards underneath. Ask your students to help you place the cards in the correct order to make a food chain leading up to the snowy owl. Repeat this exercise with the tree, caterpillar, and fi sh cards, and then again with the fl ower, dragon fl y, butterfl y, and duck cards. The three food chains you will make are shown in Figure 1.

Tell your students that two of the food chains contain at least one animal that lives in or on water for all or part of its life. Ask students to identify the two food chains and to name all of the animals that live directly in or on water. Your students will likely pick out the frog, duck, and fi sh, but they might be surprised to learn that the dragonfl y also spends part of its life in the water, as a nymph.

Complete the snowy owl food web by adding arrows as shown in Figure 2. You might ask students to help you add the arrows, but tell them that in order to keep the web simple you will not put in every arrow that could be added. (Ducks eat some kinds of grasses but you will not add this arrow.)

Snowy Owl

Grasses

Grasshopper

Mouse

Figure 1

Tree

Caterpillar

Frog

Fish Duck

Dragonfl y

Butterfl y

Flower

Snowy Owl

Grasses

Grasshopper

Mouse

Figure 2

Tree

Caterpillar

Frog

Fish Duck

Dragonfl y

Butterfl y

Flower

Review the concepts you taught in the last lesson. Then ask students to identify a producer, a consumer, a carnivore, and a herbivore in the web. For an older primary class ask: How long is the longest path? How many paths are there of that length? (There is one path of length 7.) How long is the shortest path from the top to bottom of the web? How many paths are there of that length? (There are two paths of length 4.) Which animals depend on the frog? (Three animals: the fi sh, the duck, and the snowy owl.) Find the animal that lives in water and on which the greatest number of animals depend. (The dragonfl y.)


Place the following food chains on the board.

Tree Caterpillar Frog Snake Great Horned Owl

Tree Caterpillar Frog Barn Owl

Ask your students to fi nd an animal that lives in water and that is in both of the food chains above as well as in the snowy owl food web. After students have identifi ed the frog, tell them that the frog is one of the most important animals in many Canadian food webs, because so many other animals, like the owl, depend on it for food. But the frog is also one of the Canadian animals that is most vulnerable to changes in the environment, because it is an amphibian. Amphibians like frogs and salamanders develop from eggs laid in water. When they are young they breathe water through gills, like fi sh do, and when they are older they develop lungs and breathe air, like we do. (Imagine spending your childhood breathing water and then learning to breath air!) Amphibians have extremely sensitive skin that easily absorbs the pollution and pesticides that people put in water. Populations of amphibians have declined all around the world because the marshes and ponds they depend on are being polluted or developed by humans. As a result, animals that are higher up in food webs have less to eat. (Frogs are also important because they eat vast numbers of insects. The fewer frogs there are, the more people rely on pesticides to control insects.)

Ask your students to discuss the ways they use water at home and at school and to list some things they do that might cause the water to be less clean for animals.

Often the products that clean clothes or fl oors or dishes make water less clean for animals. How can “cleaners” make water less clean? Here is an example of how this happens. Many brands of laundry soap contain chemicals called phosphates. Phosphates cause a plant called “algae” (the green slime you see in dirty aquariums) to grow out of control in lakes and streams. In lakes where there is too much algae, fi sh and other aquatic animals can’t survive. Fortunately, many stores now sell cleaners that don’t contain phosphates and other harmful chemicals. (An older primary class might do some research on where they could fi nd cleaners that don’t harm the environment.)

After your students have discussed the various ways they use water at home, point out that you can make the water in an ecosystem less clean just by running the taps, even if you don’t put anything into the water. How is this possible?

If you live in a city or town, the water that goes down your drain becomes mixed with the water from all of the homes and factories in the area. This water is normally treated in sewage plants before it is released into the lakes and rivers surrounding the town or city. But when people use too much water, or when it rains heavily, untreated water can overfl ow from the sewage plants directly into lakes and streams. So you can see how important it is not to waste water at home.

Ask for a volunteer to help you with an experiment. Turn on a tap and let the water run into a plastic tub that can hold at least 10 litres of water. While the water is running, ask the volunteer to brush their teeth or to simulate brushing their teeth for twenty seconds. (Have the class count to twenty or use the second hand of a clock as a timer.) If you don’t have a sink in your class, you could pour water out of several large water bottles at roughly the rate it would fl ow from a tap.

Stop the fl ow of water after twenty seconds. Measure the number of litres of water in the tub with a measuring cup or a container that holds a litre. Repeat the experiment, but this time only turn the tap on several times briefl y while the student brushes their teeth. Measure the amount of water used and then subtract this amount from the amount used in the fi rst experiment. Your students should see that they can save about fi ve litres of water (or ten if they run the tap full blast!) simply by turning the tap off while they brush their teeth. Ask students to estimate, by skip counting by fi ves or tens, how many litres of water they could save in a day or in a week. An older class might estimate how much they would save in a month or a year. (When you are fi nished performing the experiment, ask students what you could do with the water you collected so that it isn’t wasted.)

To give your students a picture of what the amount of water they can save looks like, point out that a bathtub


typically holds about 100 litres of water. And a bathtub holds more than enough water for a frog to lay its eggs in. If you explore the shoreline in places like Georgian Bay and other parts of Northern Ontario, you can fi nd little pools in the rocks that are smaller than a bathtub and that are full of tadpoles and other animals.

Ask your students to discuss any other ways they could save water at home or at school. An older class might discuss ways they could estimate (to the nearest fi ves, tens, or hundreds) how much water they could save by doing the following sorts of activities.

1. When you run a large bath, it can use up to 100 litres of water. A typical shower uses about 50 litres of water. Estimate how much water you could save in a week if you took showers instead of baths. About how many bathtubs could you fi ll with the extra water?

(Answer: The difference between 100 and 50 is 50. So you could save up to 50 litres of water each time you washed. If you wash every day you could save 250 litres in a week. 100 litres is one bathtub of water, so 200 litres is two bathtubs of water. 50 is half of 100 (since two 50s make 100), so 50 litres is half a bathtub. So you could save up to 2 1/2 bathtubs of water a week by showering instead of having a bath. If your shower has a shower-head that saves water, or if you take short showers, you might save even more.)

2. Many people now drink bottled water instead of tap water, even though many tests have shown that tap water is as safe and clean as bottled water. In 2006, Canadians bought over 2 billion bottles of water. (You would have to count to a hundred 20 million times to get to 2 billion!) Making and transporting the bottles creates a great deal of pollution, and disposing of the bottles creates a great deal of litter and garbage. People are now buying so much bottled water that recycling plants are clogged with the plastic. Most people don’t know that it takes seven litres of water just to make one 1-litre bottle of water. (Source: Globe and Mail, August 20, 2008.)

Estimate how much water you could save in a week or a month by carrying tap water in a reusable bottle rather than drinking bottled water. (Note: Approximately six litres of water are saved when you replace a bottle of water with tap water, but students could round this number to fi ve and count by fi ves.)

3. Challenge your students to think of other ways they could save water or make sure that the water leaving their house is clean for animals.

To fi nish the lesson you might play the following game. Tape a copy of an animal card from the snowy owl food web on each student’s back. (Leave the web on the board for students to refer to.) Students must fi nd out from other students what animal they are, by asking questions that are related to the food web. They might ask, for instance: Am I a producer? Am I a consumer? Am I a herbivore? Am I a carnivore? Do I eat grasses? Do I depend on frogs to survive? (Before the game, remind your students that an animal “depends” on another animal in the food web if they can follow a path of arrows from the other animal to the animal that depends on it. The duck, the fi sh, and the snowy owl depend on the frog directly or indirectly for their food energy.)

When the game is over, congratulate your students for the work they have done in the last few lessons discovering so many ways in which living things are interrelated. And thank them for thinking so deeply about what they can do to preserve the complex and delicate balance of the food webs of the world.

BLM 1: Introductory Shape Game (Primary) Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1

BLM 1: Introductory Shape Game (Primary)

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BLM 2: 2-D Shape Sorting Game (Primary) Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1

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BLM 3: Animal and Plant Cards Copyright © 2008 JUMP Math 1

BLM 3: Animal and Plant Cards

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Earth Rangers Lessons: Primary JUMPMath€¦ · developed books and teacher’s guides covering the...

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