Grade 4: Endangered Animals and their Habitats

One of our grade 4 teachers, Greg Neil, is presenting next week at the GEOEC conference in Canmore Alberta.

Greg's presentation is going to focus on the Galileo Inquiry Rubric, and then use a Grade 4 project he designed on endangered animals as a case study of inquiry in action.

The purpose of the project was to have students understand the different regions in Alberta, and to explore the understanding of "land" by attempting to take on the perspective of an endangered animal with one of the regions.

Student worked through a variety of tasks, leading up to a final podcast, taking on the voice of an animal, talking about their habitat. Along the way students:

• explored the different regions, using this site as a resource
• viewed the Lorax as a hook into the concept of endangered species
• complied a list of animals within their region, and then color coded the animals based on the degree of "endangerment"
• had two experts speak to the class, one from the Cochrane Ecological Institute, and Leanne Allison, a local filmmaker.
• chose an endangered or threatened species to research
• wrote a report, with peer editing using track changes (WORD) along the way
• used Pages (Apple) to create a one-page endangered animal report
• created a final podcast from the perspective of their endangered animal

These steps, with resources, can be found in more detail by clicking here.

Here is the presentation created by Greg, given at the GEOEC conference:

Here is one of the grade 4 student podcasts:

Here is that same students, reflecting back on her work a year later: