Owls

Read Owl Moon by Jane Yolen to the class. Discuss the details of the story and tell the class that the author is the person who wrote the story and the illustrator, John Schoenherr, is the person who drew the pictures. Revisit the book and have students repeat the names of the author and the illustrator.

Pass around a toy stuffed owl to indicate who has speaking permission. Ask students to tell a fact or ask a question pertaining to owls when they get the toy owl. Others will be required to listen. Perhaps the next student knows the answer to the question and can gain the owl by raising their hand.

Read There's An Owl in The Shower by Jean Craighead George. Discuss the problems associated with endangered animals. Create a list of possible ways to help endangered animals like the spotted owl.

Gather clipart, toy, photographic or other images of owls. Place them in relative positions in the classroom. Have students identify the owl that is “next to” the yellow book, “on top of” the chair, etc.

Measure and create paper wings to demonstrate accurate owl wingspans for two to three owl species. Discuss size differences.

Read the “Do the Math” section from this website's Owls Facts and perform the actual math described in that section. Check your answer against the site for accuracy of computation. Create a ratio table for a period of time — days, weeks, or other — different than the period given in the example. Now create a ratio table for a parliament of owls (5 owls, 100 owls, or other) instead of just one.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Information should be obtained from text readings and media provided by the teacher. Examples of patterns of behaviors could include the signals that offspring make (such as crying, cheeping, and other vocalizations) and the responses of the parents (such as feeding, comforting, and protecting the offspring).

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

• Emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the animals 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 also affects the traits that an organism develops.

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

• Changes animals 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.