• Animals have life cycles that include being born, developing into
adults, reproducing, and eventually dying. The details of this life
cycle are different for different organisms.
• Animals move, grow and change over time.
• All organisms must be able to obtain and use resources, grow, reproduce
and maintain stable internal conditions while living in a constantly
changing external environment.
• Explore the benefits of diversity.
• Students recognize similarities and differences in individuals,
families, and groups.
Teams of three are asked to perform, draw pictures and create
a life-cycle diagram depicting the life cycle of their farm animal. Students
might choose to all perform (two parents and one baby), and all draw.
Creative expression is encouraged, as long as the goal is achieved. Ten
farm animals will cover 30 students.
Overhead of LifeCycleChart.pdf.
Art supplies: crayons, paper, colored pencils. Pictures of farm animals
from such sources as: TenSpecies.pdf,
the playing cards, kit posters and the slideshow. All images in the
slideshow can be printed and posted for student reference to inform
the unit.
ARTISTIC ANIMALS
1. Divide students into teams of three and assign each team a farm
animal.
2. Tell them the goal is for them to produce three things:
a. Drawings
of their animal at different ages.
b. A performance of the animal
family. For the performance, students will act out the roles
of father, mother and baby. One student might do baby to adulthood, and
become a mother who partners with a father. Or, they might begin as a
family and the baby grows up. The objective is for the three students
to depict the life cycle of the animals.
c. A diagram showing the animal's lifecycle: birth,
growth, adulthood, reproduction (a new life), death. The life
cycle should show the same elements as the performance. For example,
for a life cycle a student might include: birth, growth and development,
independence, adulthood, reproduction and death. You may want to assign
the main steps and have students add to the cycle as they wish.
Other steps
of this process can be added as students can handle such as:
walks/swims/moves around on it's own; independent from mother/weaned;
gathers it's own food; maturity; cares for it's young; no longer
able to have babies; grandparent; decline/loss of youth and abilities;
old age; no longer able to move around on it's own, no longer
able to feed itself, death.
These additions help students see
life on a continuum, illustrating how we return to many of the
conditions of infant status as we approach death. This level
of detail and discussion of death needs to be handled with discretion,
according to school policy and a teacher's ability to attenuate.
The real message of the unit is that all living things go through
similar stages in the cycle of life.
