Habitats - Animals in Winter

Focus: Animals have differing habitat requirements during the winter, depending upon their levels of activity and the availability of food.

Puppets (Herbie Hare (with a white coat and a brown coat), Robby Robin, Woody Woodchuck, Betty the Mourning Cloak Butterfly, Rocky Raccoon, Charlie Chipmunk, Marsha Mouse)

Materials Checklist
Puppet Show (puppets, script, cotton balls, white cloth, tiny suitcase)
Winter Tales (Winter Scenario cards)
Animal Bingo (Animal Bingo cards, Animal Bingo clues, edible bingo chips – animal crackers or other snacks)
Animal Signs (Animal Signs cards, pencils, clipboards)
Winter Mural (large winter mural, pictures of common local animals)
Slide Show (slide show, projector, screen)
Make A Mural (5/6 ELF) (large paper or window shade, drawing paper or cardstock, craft paper, pencils, marker pens, paints, crayons, scissors, tape, winter mural sketch & animal strategies key)

Supplemental Reference Materials (Slide show scripts: Grades K-2, Grades 3-6, Bingo cards, Winter Tales - Scenario cards, Winter Scene for Mural, Winter Mural additions, Mural - Key to Animal Strategies, Animal Signs card, 5/6 ELF Activity: Make a Mural, 5/6 ELF Supplement: Animal Habitats in Winter)

Additional Reading/Resources
Stokes Guide to Nature in Winter, by Donald and Lillian Stokes, Little Brown and Co., 1979.
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich, ECCO Publishers, 2003.
Animals Prepare for Winter, by Elaine Pascoe, Gareth Stevens Publishing, Milwaukee, WI, 2002.
Mammal Tracks and Sign, by Mark Elbroch, Stackpole Books, Mechanicsville, PA, 2003.
ELF Corner: Winter Insects, A Batty Bookmark, or A Christmas Tree for the Critters (pdf files)

ELF Notes - Template for newsletter on Animals in Winter
*Word document * pdf file

For Younger Children
Many of the activities in VINS's new Small Wonders book can be used in ELF, too. To find appropriate activities for children aged 3-6, click here.

Teaching Suggestions
Puppet Show
Change the Woodchuck's 4th line to read: “Well, I'm not completely frozen, not like Pauly Peeper. He's got some special frog antifreeze…” as toads actually burrow below the level of frost penetration!

Winter Tales
You may want to hang up the mural at the start of the workshop and place the card pictures around the border to give students help in identifying the critters in the skits. (Include an extra animal or two so the class can't determine final skit by process of elimination.)

Possible additional city critters Winter Scenarios for skits:

• Gray squirrels: We stay active searching for the nuts and seeds we buried in lawns and hid under leaves all fall.
• Crows: We find shelter on stormy days, but fly for miles to eat leftover corn in fields or to scavenge scraps in the city from discarded people food or road kill.
• Sparrows: We look for weed and flower seeds left standing in the garden. We're grateful for people who keep their bird feeders filled.
• Skunks: We go from dormant to active as it warms up during the winter. In late winter, we look for scraps from garbage cans or pet food in outside bowls; we are sometimes too groggy and slow to avoid fast moving cars.
• Pigeons: We like togetherness. We feed in groups on scraps of people food or handouts, as well as on our natural diet of seed, nuts, fruits and grains. When it is cold we fluff up our feathers and huddle together to stay warm.

Animal Bingo
Change to Animal Challenge and have the point of the activity be to cover as many animals as the children can. Once all squares are covered, have the children call out "Winter" instead of "Bingo."

For younger children, give each 5 animal crackers to place over the 5 animals on their card that they are most interested in learning more about. Kids eat the edible chip as the clue is read about that animal.

Put Cheerios or other whole grain cereal in a big bowl and scoop out a dixie cup full for each child to eat AND to use as Bingo chips.

Change the Snowshoe Hare clue to read: “…I'm camouflaged in my white fur coat…” so as not to be confused with the white tailed deer clue.

Change the Blue Jay clue to read: “…I'll set up a noisy 'jay jay' alarm if an enemy comes in sight” so as not to be confused with the squirrel.

Change the Wood Turtle clue to read: “I hibernate in winter in the mud and gravel beneath the stream…” as they do not necessarily bury deep into the mud.

If you are teaching in an urban environment, add a few animal clues that reflect a city habitat:

• Gray Squirrel: In winter I get plenty of exercise hopping from branch to rooftop to birdfeeder, or digging up acorns that I buried in lawns and under leaves all fall.
• Woolly Bear: In winter I curl up in the neatly stacked woodpile in your backyard, or under the warm leafy mulch of a flower garden.
• Little Brown Bat: My home in winter is topsy turvy, but that's how I like to hibernate hanging upside down in a cave or an unused shed with my friends close around me.
• Striped skunk: A rotting log, tree stump or old woodchuck hole in the park makes a good winter home for me. I sleep through the coldest days in my black and white pajamas.

Animal Signs
Especially with youngest children, before taking kids outside you'll want to survey the area for signs that students can reach.

If you are doing ELF in a city, for part of the Animal Signs outdoor search, have children pretend to be an animal. "Your habitat challenge is to find a good place on this street to take shelter from a storm, or find a winter home. Where is there nearby food?" You might assign a common city dweller (animals/ birds/ insects) to small groups of children who then have to search out an appropriate habitat or shelter for that animal. "How often do animal habitats include people spaces? Will your animal co-exist with humans, or will there be problems?" Have each small group share their observations with the class. "What are some of the benefits of being an animal in a city in the winter? Some of the hazards?"

Winter Mural
If necessary, in addition to the photos provided, you can use pictures of the animals from Winter Tales and Animal Bingo. If your mural is laminated (or covered with a sheet of plastic) and the picture cards are laminated with a loop of easily removable painter's masking tape on the back, the animals can be stuck on and pulled off the mural and reused by each classroom group. (Please don't use double-sided tape - it's very hard to get off the cards!)

Urban ELF suggestion: Be sure the mural scene includes elements of your own urban landscape such as tall buildings, parks or woods, houses with backyards, sheds or garages, trees and shrubs, lawn and gardens.

Kids can be easily distracted if you hand out the pictures ahead of time. Instead, put the cards face down near the mural. Kids come up in pairs, and then pick up a card to place on mural. OR
Ask children to come up and place their card on the mural according to various categories like "Come up if your animal remains dormant" or "... if your animal migrates" or "... if your animal remains active here in the winter" so kids have to pay attention and really think about their critter.

Include a few animals that migrate or die in the winter to enrich the discussion.

Going outside in an urban environment
Take children for a short walk in the school neighborhood to look for potential winter shelters and food sources for city dwelling animals. Dense shrubs, evergreen hedges, well mulched flower gardens, a dying tree or a small woodpile may serve as winter homes with pantries, or hiding places for a variety of animals. What might live under a boulder in a vacant lot, or under a porch, or behind the garage? What critters might invade houses or other people spaces? Examples: Bats in the attic, mice in the engine of an unused car, spiders in the basement, mosquitoes in the bathroom in December.

Alternate sequence
You might want to start with the Slide Show as an introduction to wintering strategies. Then do Winter Tales skits to explore some specifics. Animal Bingo looks at specific habitats. Then go outside for Search. Back inside do Winter Mural as a review and end with the Puppet Show.

Extensions
Demonstrate the difference between woodchuck's awake and hibernating heartbeat rates (160/minute vs. 4/minute).

You might want to try "Adapt-All Salesman" skit. Kids get cards describing various animals with different hardship in need of something from the traveling salesman to get through the winter. For example, card reads "rabbit stuck in deep snow." Student portrays this critter to the traveling salesman who pulls snowshoes out of his bag. "Bear who can't sleep through the winter" gets a tub of shortening and a sleep mask, and so on.

Students can make a simple accordion book with one of the bingo animals cut out and glued down on each page plus a simple caption about where it spends the winter.

Check out NY Science Times article from 1/7/03 entitled "Signs of Survival in a Frozen Forest" by Bernd Heinrich.

• excerpts from Stokes Guide to Observing Insect Lives
  The woolly bear is a species (Isia isabella) of tiger moth, appropriately named for its larval stage as a large, furry caterpillar. "It overwinters as a larva curled up under loose bark or in some other protected place. In spring it resumes eating leaves and soon pupates in a cocoon that contains most of the caterpillar's hairs held together with silk."

Learning Goals

Concepts/Ideas

• Animals may remain in the same habitat during winter or move short or long distances to meet their needs.
• Winter's cold temperatures, snowy conditions and short days can make it hard for animals to meet basic needs for food, water and adequate shelter.
• Animals cope with winter changes in habitat in different ways.
• Tracks and feeding signs of animals tell about winter animal activity outdoors.

Vocabulary: Habitat, Coping, Survival Strategies, Migration, Hibernation, Dormancy, Burrowing, Predators, Prey

Skills

• Active listening to learn about winter habitats and ways animals cope with winter.
• Role playing to understand winter survival strategies of a variety of animals.
• Observing and recording signs of animal activity outdoors.

Grade Expectations:
Grades PK-K (S30) Animals that live in places with cold winters must have shelter from the cold and ways of getting food and water to stay alive.

Grades 1-2 (S30) Animals that live through cold winters are made up of body parts that enable them to get the food, water, and air they need to survive in the places they live.

Grades 3-4 (S30) Animals that live in cold climates have physical and behavioral characteristics that help them to get what they need to survive in their winter environment.

Grades 5-6 Animals' physical and behavioral adaptations enable them to move to alternative wintering areas, collect and store food, build or find shelters to establish a protected habitat so that they may survive harsh winter conditions.

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