Elk

Using words such as hooves, antlers, herbivore, migrate, and bugle, create a four-page book about elk. Write one sentence per page and illustrate it. 

Using grade-level books and digital sources, learn about one subtopic pertaining to elk:  food, life cycle, habitat, etc.  Share your findings with your class or group. 

Create a book for students in a younger grade that could be fictional (The Day the Elk Came to School) or nonfictional (All About Elk). Use the writing process to create a finished product, complete with illustrations.

Provide multiple images of herds of elk. Students count the number of elk in each herd. 

Do some research to find out how large elk antlers can get and how they compare to the size of the animal. Create student antlers using paper tubes. Measure the sizes of the antlers to represent accurate dimensions and weight. Have students carry their antlers on their heads as they try to perform regular daily routine. Can they get through the doorways, can they run, how difficult is it to eat and so on?

Locate an elk migration map online. Calculate the total distance a given elk herd travels over the course of a year. Then have students measure and walk this distance over their lunch hours and recesses (collectively or individually.)

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Examples of observations could include the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals.

Plants and animals can change their environment. Examples of plants and animals changing their environment could include a squirrel digging in the ground to hide its food and that tree roots can break concrete.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

All organisms have external parts. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see; hear; grasp objects; protect themselves; move from place to place; and seek, find, and take in food, water, and air.  Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive.

Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.

Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways. Young animals are very much, but not exactly like, their parents. An individual of a particular breed looks like its parents but is not exactly the same.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places. Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles. Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. Characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning.

Examples of evidence could include needs, characteristics of the organisms, and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal’s brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.

The energy released from food was once energy from the Sun. The energy was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter. Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth and the energy they need to maintain body warmth and for motion.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. An example of cause and effect relationships could be animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there. When the environment changes in ways that affect a place’s physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, temperature, food, and other organisms.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.

In multicellular organisms, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues and organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.

Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and nonliving, are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the
organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem. 

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations. Emphasis is on recognizing patterns in data and making warranted inferences about changes in populations, and on evaluating empirical evidence supporting arguments about changes to ecosystems.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others. Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals, such as overproduction of offspring, passage of time, variation in a population, selection of favorable traits, and heritability of traits.

Adaptation by natural selection acting over generations is one important process by which species change over time in response to changes in environmental conditions. Traits that support successful survival and reproduction in the new environment become more common; those that do not become less common.