Ashleigh's Education Journey

Helpful 3rd – 5th Grade Teaching Resources

Animal Adaptations Lessons

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Animal adaptations are such a fun science unit to teach in upper elementary. This blog post shares lots of ideas for different activities to teach about different animal adaptations, including hibernation, mimicry, and more. Click through to get ideas for your 3rd grade, 4th grade, or 5th grade classroom!

Animal and plant adaptations has to be one of my favorite science units. There are several fun animal adaptation lessons and activities that students love, and there are so many ways to make this topic meaningful to students. This post shares a few activities you can use to teach plan and animal adaptations, as well as a link to my Plant and Animal Adaptations unit.

Birds’ Beaks Experiment

Last week we did one of my favorite science experiments of the year. We’ve been studying how birds’ beaks are physical adaptions of birds. To expand on this concept, we did an experiment on birds’ beaks. This activity does require quite a bit of preparation, but I feel that it is definitely worth the work. I collected several types of tools to serve as birds’ beaks (tongs, tweezers, slotted spoons, eye droppers, staple removers, etc.)  Then, I collected a variety of bird foods (snails/macaroni, grubs/m&ms, nectar/red water, worms/ gummy worms, small seeds, large seeds, flesh/staples in cardboard, fish/paper clips, beetles/raisins, duckweed/Styrofoam).  I typically mix the food in with oatmeal or potting soil to make it a little more realistic for students.  During the activity students have two attempts to collect as much food as possible with the two beaks of their choice.  I like to give students 30 seconds for each attempt, and I have students record their results on their data collection sheet. This is probably one of my top five favorite lessons for the entire year, because my students learn so much about adaptations.

Yum!  Snails!
 Grubs anyone?
 Students complete this recording sheet as they work. This helps keep them organized and moving in a productive directions.
 Every year my students LOVE this activity!  I think it really drives home the idea of how different birds have adapted to live in different habitats.

Bird Beaks and Feet

I use the hands-on activity to lead students into a worksheet on bird beak adaptations and a sorting activity on how birds’ feet are adapted to different environments. Students match the bird’s feet, with a description and picture.

Camouflage

Another animal adaptation students learned about was camouflage. My students colored and hid butterflies around the room, and they colored butterflies, so that they would blend in to their “environment”.  This was such a fun activity, and since I teach two different groups of students, each group got to go on a butterfly hunt to try to find all of the hidden butterflies.

I was so impressed with their creativity, and both groups really grasped the concept of camouflage. We also had a Camouflage Day where students wore camouflage to school. This is a small group of students who participated.

Animal Adaptation Lessons & Vocabulary

I display the adaptation posters below for essential vocabulary practice. We also play a few of the vocabulary games I blogged about in this blog post.

Graphic Organizers

 There are several different graphic organizers have been very helpful for students within the unit. Students added an animal adaptation foldable to their interactive notebooks.There are all kinds of flipbooks and folding activities and sorts that would be perfect for interactive notebooks.  Since we’re not using science notebooks this year, we just did them on construction paper. There is a sort of different plant adaptations that are found in different biomes.
Some of the graphic organizers students were completed were based on physical adaptations and behavior adaptations. Students also learn about the parts of a plant and how those parts can adapt to their environment.
There are also plenty of other hands on lessons that I didn’t get an chance to take any pictures of us completing.  It’s so funny that I often don’t think about taking a picture until after we’ve cleaned up! If you’d like to see my Plant and Animal Adaptations Unit, you can check out the link here.

Adaptations Reading Passages

I’ve also created a series of reading passages that can be used to integrate reading and science. The passages are written on three different reading levels for easy differentiation. There are three sets of questions for each topic. Any level of passage can be used to answer the comprehension questions. The first set of comprehension questions are basic, right-there questions. The second set of questions focus on nonfiction text features and vocabulary. The third set requires an extended constructed response paragraph where students cite text evidence.
I hope you find a few new and exciting animal adaptations lessons and activities in this post. Feel free to share your favorites in the comments. If you’re looking for instructional strategies for teaching science, be sure to check out this post. It’s packed with content!

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Comments

  3. Maho says

    Hi i liked ur activity alot especially the birds beaks adaptations but i would like more information about the wG u did the experiment. Thnx

    Reply

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