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From Greening School Grounds - Creating Habitats for Learning, edited by Tim Grant and Gail Littlejohn

Grades K-3

Math

Landscape Tally: Take a walk to look for different colors, shapes or objects. Have students keep a tally and simple graphs to represent the numbers in the various categories. How would you describe your area to someone from another city or country?

Classification: Have students collect 20 or more leaves and sort them by color, shape, etc. Discuss how different classification criteria lead to different distributions. What are some of the criteria we use to classify groups of organisms such as mammals, birds, plants and insects? How might our ordering change if we used different criteria?

Science

Wild Groceries: Discuss the position of items in a grocery store: some are on the top shelp, some are on the floor, some are stored in the basement. Have students look at the outside environment as a grocery store. What types of food are located on the top shelf (canopy), lower shelf (understory), bottom shelf (ground), and basement (underground). From what shelves do different animals "shop"? Do most animals "shop" from the same shelf, or are they evenly distributed?

Animal Tracks: Look for animal tracks in the mud, sand or snow. Have students try to move their bodies in such a way as to leave track patterns similar to those they have seen. How difficult is it to move like other animals? Do you think rabbits, deer, or mice would have problems walking like us? How does this relate to the concept adaptation?