Habitats - Forest Floor

Focus: The forest floor is a habitat teeming with life, much of which is involved with the decomposition of leaf litter and the recycling of nutrients.

Puppets(Ellie Eft, Papa Newt, Dead Leaf, Wendy Worm, Freddy Fungus, Mildred Millipede, Sammy Shrew)

Materials Checklist
Puppet Show (puppets, script, maracas or jar of beads to shake)
Lie Down and Look (plastic bags to lie on if the ground is very wet)
Digging Deeper (20-24" strands of yarn, one for each group; pencils, clipboards, sheets of cardboard, optional insect field guides, hand lenses, bug boxes)
Forest Foray (Forest Foray cards, clipboards, pencils, optional trash bags)
Meet an Earthworm (earthworms, one for every two children, hand lenses, paper plates or shoe box lids, paper towels, water mister, worm anatomy diagram, worm castings)
Worm Preferences (worms, paper plates, cardboard or construction paper, clamp or gooseneck lamps, paper towels, water, maple leaves and pine needles)
Mystery Bags (cloth bags, forest floor objects such as wood, nut, acorn, moss, leaves, cone, bark, stick, pine needles, rock, fungus, bone, snail shell, optional candy jelly worms)
Forest Floor Interpretive Trails (5/6 ELF) (Forest Foray guides, Interpretive Trail Brochure template, stakes, surveyor's tape, marker pens, pencils, index cards)

Supplementary Reference Materials (Forest Foray cards, Worm Innards, Windows on Worm Life, Fungi on Rotting Wood, 5/6 ELF Activity: Forest Floor Interpretive Trails, Forest Foray Guide and Trifold Template). Click here for a color version of fungi: Fungi on Rotting Wood (pdf file)

Additional Reading/Resources
The Trees in My Forest, by Bernd Heinrich, Perennial Press, 1998.
The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America, edited by Frank Gilliam and Mark Robert, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Read more about Earthworms
Frequently asked questions about worms.

ELF Corner: Hey Big Daddy! (pdf file)
ELF Corner: Making a Miniature Woodland Trail (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
Lie Down and Look
Use a big tarp, and have children lie first head to head in a wheel (or two rows) on their backs to look up. Then flip over to lie feet to feet on their bellies to look down and dig around.

If it's rainy, you still can have students inside lie on their backs and visualize a forest through guided imagery. Could have group pretend they are in an open field on a hot day and then on a forest floor on a similar day. Contrast these two different habitats.

Digging Deeper
Give students a simple digging tool (Popsicle stick) and a hand lens. Shoebox tops work well as display boards. Include a variety of sticky materials: double-sided tape, glue sticks, tape, regular white glue.
Give each group a bug box, too!

Stress to the children that they are digging into a habitat and they should put things back as they were found.

Visit two different outdoor areas, pine and hardwood, to compare.

Forest Foray
Write up each task on a separate card. Then, outside, give each small group one item to search for before returning to you for another card.

We added a forest floor “spell” at the end of our outing – everyone had to pick up a leaf, then we waved them around in the air and said “abracadabra, turn into soil” as we threw them down onto the ground. This spell always works.

Worm Preferences
Be sure students allow 10 minutes for worms to react.

Be aware that worms do not always behave as students predict! In fact, the worms often do something unexpected – like leaving the paper plates, or going to the edge of the plastic shoebox and going round and round the perimeter, regardless of conditions (showing not that the experiments don't work, but that the worms were more interested in escaping to a safe place, and nothing in the setup seemed safe or comfortable enough).

You may want to first brainstorm some of the things worms MIGHT like – see what the kids think about wet/dry, dark/light, rough/smooth, dirt/no dirt/rocks, warm/cool – see what the kids think will happen when worms have a choice, and then set up a place where worms can be let go – and see what they do. Each small group of kids gets a dishpan and sets it up with two or more habitat possibilities. They then release 3-4 worms into the pan and see how long it takes worms to find a preferred place (or not.) Encourage students to make as many observations as they can, report to the group, and compile the class's knowledge of worm preferences. How do these fit with what they know of a worm's life?

Keep a few spray bottles handy for wetting worms and hands. Night crawlers work well for examining worm anatomy, though garden worms are faster and more adventurous.

When examining the worms:
The clitellum sometimes shows up better if you flip the worms over, though in some cases it just seems to be absent.
To feel the setae, run your finger over the worm in two directions – one way they feel smooth, the other way they feel prickly.

For wet/dry experiment, tape down a paper towel and then wet one side, leave other side dry.

You don't need to use a lamp to test light vs. dark preferences in the daytime.
Deeper containers work better than paper plates.

You can set up preferences as stations ahead of time. When the children begin Meet an Earthworm, one of the volunteers can place a worm at each station. Right after Meet an Earthworm, then, the group is divided into three small groups. Children then visit each station with their group, with one recorder in each group noting their observations.

Mystery Bags
Old pillow cases work well for this.
This can also be done as a game, with kids feeling and then guessing what is in the bag, writing down their answers. Leader then shows them what was in each bag.

Order of Activities
Outside, you might want to rearrange the order of activities to do Forest Foray before Lie Down/Digging, so students get the big picture of what a forest is.

Extension
A longer-term experiment would be to set up a worm culture and test the worms' food preferences by offering different food types, like oatmeal, carrot, lettuce, tree leaves, bread, or other things. What gets eaten first?

Learning Goals

Concepts/Ideas:

• The forest floor is home to many organisms that break down and recycle plant and animal debris over the year.
• The forest floor, protected from extremes by the canopy of trees overhead, is cool, shady, and rich in nutrients.
• Earthworms, a common inhabitant of the forest floor, help to fertilize, decompose, aerate the soil, feed other animals, and mix soil layers. They have preferences for particular habitat conditions found on the forest floor.

Vocabulary: Habitat, Forest Floor, Decomposer, Decomposition, Recycle, Debris, Eft, Newt, Fungus, Humus, Hyphae, Earthworm, Segment, Clitella, Setae

Skills:

• Actively listening to learn about some of the inhabitants of the forest floor.
• Experiencing conditions and identifying components of the forest floor through using the senses.
• Observing layers of leaf litter on the forest floor to see decomposition in action.
• Investigating and making record of different features of the forest environment
• Examining the anatomy of earthworms using a hand lens and labeled diagrams.
• Testing earthworm preferences for different habitat conditions

Grade Expectations:
Grades PK-K (S30, S38) The forest floor is “home” for a variety of plants and animals. Plants and animals that live on the forest floor need water, food and air to live. Earthworms are one kind of animal that lives on the forest floor.

Grades 1-2 (S30, S34, S35) The forest floor as habitat provides food water shelter and space for plants and animals that live there. All animals that live on the forest floor depend on plants. Some animals on the forest floor eat plants for food; other animals eat animals that eat plants. Some animals and plants depend on decaying materials and dead organisms for food. Earthworms have physical and behavioral characteristics that help them to survive on the forest floor.

Grades 3-4 (S30, S34, S35, S36) Energy derived from food is needed by plants and animals that live on the forest floor to stay alive and grow. The forest floor serves as habitat for plants and animals whose needs are met there. Plants and animals on the forest floor interact in various ways in addition to providing food.

Grades 5-6 (S30, S34-S37) Plants and animals that live in the forest floor have physical and behavioral characteristics that make it possible for them to survive there. Decomposers are organisms that use waste material and dead organisms for food. Forest floor inhabitants engage in interdependent relationships as they acquire their food to meet energy needs.

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