Yesterday for Central Home School Fellowship, I did a lesson for the PreK-third graders on Sharks.
I used these resources to help with the lesson:
Shedd Aquarium – Lesson Plan on Sharks
http://www.sheddaquarium.org/pdf/education/edu_guide_sharks.pdf
Sea World – Lesson plan on Sharks
http://www.seaworld.org/just-for-teachers/guides/pdf/shark-4-8.pdf
Discovery Sharks Survive by their Senses – Video
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/shark-week/videos/sharks-survive-by-their-senses.htm
National Geographic Shark Detective video
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/kids/animals-pets-kids/wild-detectives-kids/wd-ep4-sharkguy/
So after looking through the resources I had, which is a lot of material, I chose to focus on the following:
1) What makes a shark a fish? (we discussed this as a group)
2) What makes sharks different from bony fish?
--we looked at their skin and their teeth, I had some sand paper to replicate their skin and we talked about how their skin (denticles), look like the sharks teeth (we used some magnified pictures of their skin to see this)
--we talked about their skeleton made of cartilage, etc.
Then I had some cut out examples of various sharks teeth, so we could be detectives to figure out what type of food we thought they would eat, with their specific teeth.
There were lots of cute ideas about what sharks ate.
We learned that not all sharks are meat eaters. Like Whale sharks that feed on plankton!
So the kids looked at shark teeth, lots of shark teeth!
We also talked about the senses of the shark, about their best sense is hearing. Did you know that they can detect sound up to a mile away? Because sound travels faster in the water. We watched the short videos on the IPad.
The video above from Discovery is wonderful about the sharks senses and the Shedd aquarium gives a diagram of the sharks senses and at what distance they can detect sound, smell, etc.
We also learned about their Amupullae of Lorenzini. So we created a electrostatic detector with a paper clip and two pieces of aluminum foil. This is from the Shedd Aquarium pdf file. I did not use the baby food jar with it. Anyhow, I had the kids rub their heads with the balloons and make static electricity. I had one student be the shark using the Amupullae of Lorenzini to see if they could detect the "fish" which would be giving off a charge. So some kids were coral and some were fish. If they were a fish they put the side of their balloon up that was charged, if they were just the reef they put up the side that was not charged. If the Amupullae detects a charge the aluminum foil pieces move, they twitch.
We also went outside and played sharks and minnows.
There were a few other things that I had planned but we did not get to.
So I had my own kids work on it at home today.
Like make a shark book (from Sea World's pdf) and also do another pdf from Sea World on classification of the sharks based on their anatomy.
So if you were looking today for a lesson on Sharks. Hopefully these resources I found will help you!
