Snakes

Invite a guest from the zoo or other wildlife agency that can bring in a snake. After the guest has given their presentation, have them ask questions about snakes for students to answer. Invite students to ask questions about the snake.

Read the book, Time For Kids: Snakes! (ISBN: 0060576367 or 0060576375), and discuss captions, subheadings, etc. Look for similar text features in the Science Trek Snakes: Facts website.

What is your opinion of snakes? Some people love them and even keep them as pets. Some people are deathly afraid of snakes. Discuss your opinion and include details to support your thoughts about these creatures.

Build snakes using clay or salt dough. Include significant attributes such as the rattles of a rattlesnake or the hood of the King Cobra.

Make a worksheet for students with several snakes of different lengths. Students measure the various snakes with the inch side of a ruler and show data on a line plot. 

Using graph paper, count out the squares necessary to construct a cube 25 cubic cm. Fold the cube sides together and build the 3D shape. Choose a snake species, and on each side of the cube, write one fact about your chosen species. Don't forget to name the type of snake on one of the six sides. Exploratorium.edu has some instructions in cube-making that may be useful.

Examples of patterns could include that all animals need food in order to live and grow, and the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals. Animals obtain their food from plants or from other animals.

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.

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 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.

Supporting Content:

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.

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.

• 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.

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.