Students apply what they have learned about animal characteristics and adaptation to create a new creature and introduce it to the scientific community.
Introduce students to amazing animal adaptations by reading Extreme Animals: The Toughest Creatures on Earth by Nicola Davies.
Ask your students to share what they know about other amazing creatures. Then, inspire them with examples of newly-discovered species, such as these from Live Science.
Tell students that they will take unique features and characteristics from different plants or animals they know or have researched and combine them together into a new species. They will then create a visual model of the new species, name it, and describe its unique adaptations to introduce it to the rest of the scientific community.
Have students begin their work by describing the habitat in which their new animal will live including information about weather, plants, animals, and temperature.
Ask students to create a creature with adaptations that help it survive in this environment. Encourage them to look to other creatures in similar habitats to identify features and characteristics that would help this creature thrive in its habitat.
Assign a blank page to students and have them use the paint tools to create their creature.
To create a creature from a combination of clip art images, students can use the Image button to add stickers of animals with the physical traits they need. It is helpful to add these to the edges of a blank page so there is space in the middle to work.
Students should select each animal image and glue it to the paint layer so that it can be edited. Now students can use the Lasso tool to select just the part they want to use and move it to the blank space on the page. Repeat this process to combine all of the pieces together into a new animal, using the paint tools to complete if necessary.
If students want to use the animal on multiple pages, select the entire new creature, go to the Edit menu, and select Convert to Sticker.
Students should finish their project by adding text descriptions, labels, and audio or video narration.
Host a Meet Our Creatures night where students present their creatures via slide shows or visual displays. Invite local experts in flora and fauna, such as park rangers and veterinarians, to ask questions, evaluate, and celebrate student work.
Nicola Davies. Extreme Animals: The Toughest Creatures on Earth. ISBN: 0763641278
Pamela Hickman. Animals in Motion: How Animals Swim, Jump, Slither and Glide. ISBN: 1550745751
3-LS3-2 Heredity: Inheritance and Variation of Traits
Use evidence to support the explanation that traits can be influenced by the environment.
3-LS4-3 Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survives less well, and some cannot survive at all.