Wolves

Wolves use body language to communicate. See this Wolf site for more information. Humans use a lot of non-verbal communication to share thoughts and feelings. Create a list of them such as nodding the head to say “yes,” shaking a finger, or frowning.

Read Little Red Riding Hood by Trina Schart Hyman, Honestly, Red Riding Hood was Rotten!: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf (The Other Side of the Story) by Trisha Speed Shaskan, The Three Pigs by David Weisner and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka. Compare the wolf in all four stories. Why are wolves often portrayed as villains?

Divide the class into two groups: one “For” and the other “Against” reintroducing wolves into an ecosystem. Have students in each group research their given view and report back in a discussion format.

Play Wolfie Wolf: An Outdoor Math Game (get instructions). This is a counting game that also uses time to the hour concepts.

Using this timeline for wolf pups, create graphs about wolf growth and compare to human growth.

Using the data found on this U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page, write some word problems about wolf populations. Trade with a partner to solve.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The environment affects the traits that an organism develops.

Characteristics result from individuals' interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning.

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.

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems.

Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

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 ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

Changes in biodiversity can influence ecosystem services that humans rely on.

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.

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 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.

• 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 and organs that are specialized for particular body functions.