Mountain Goats

Have a guest speaker bring in a domesticated goat and talk about them. Students can ask questions to compare domesticated goats to mountain goats or to clarify details about goats in general.

Before beginning your unit on mountain goats, have students each generate a question about them. When you have finished studying them, have students answer their own question or trade and have students answer someone else's question.

Research hooved animals (ungulates) and compare 2-3 different species. Create a Venn diagram for your comparison. Here is a two-circle Venn and here is a three-circle Venn to print.

Using a piece of graph paper as the mountain, get the mountain goat to the top first. Roll the dice once to get the goat to move forward. On your next turn, roll just one of them and subtract as the goat retreats to get water or food. On the next turn roll both dice and move forward again. Play in pairs or in small groups.

How much is the word "mountain goat" worth, when the letters have different values, e.g., a=50, b=100, c=150, and so on? Change up the values to create new problems.

Before doing this activity, preselect values for each of the parts of the mountain goat. This could be done by the teacher, or as a group effort. Give each student a copy of this printable. Students roll dice, placing the values into columns for place value until they reach the preselected value. When they arrive at a number that can be rounded to one of the preselected values, that part of the goat anatomy gets colored. Be the first to get all parts colored. For a basic version, allow students to work on only one part at a time, color it and then move to another part. For a challenge and a bit of strategy, students can choose which roll of the dice goes to which part of the anatomy.

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

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Plants need water and light to live and grow.

Examples of observations could include that animals need to take in food, but plants produce their own; the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals; the requirement of plants to have light; and that all living things need water.

Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents.

Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways.

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.

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 and take in food.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.

The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

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.

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

The environment affects the traits that an organism develops.

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.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism.

Changes organisms go through during their life form a pattern.

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.

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

When the environment changes in ways that affect a place's physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of food and water, some animals survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics.

Examples 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.

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.

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.

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

Changes in biodiversity can influence humans’ resources, such as food, energy, and medicines, as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on-for example, water purification and recycling.

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… The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.

Similarly, 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 competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared.

Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

• 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.

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