CH. 6 Life Between two worlds: diving birds and mammals
Dive!
NOTE: This unit is in draft form. Revisions and additions will be made until this note does not appear. For questions or suggestions, contact:
mdlutz@ucdavis.edu
About the unit
Did you know that a elephant seal can hold its breath for 77 min and dive 5,000 feet in the sea? We are still working on the science to discover just what enables these remarkable feats under intense pressure, cold, and dark. Diving birds and mammals utilize physical, behavioral, and physiological adaptations to withstand the extreme conditions of diving and still return to the surface with a meal and oxygen reserves. Your students can join us in investigating just how they do this.
This unit will review the concepts of pressure changing with depth, marine food webs, structure and function, photosynthesis and respiration, and of course, the process of science. It will introduce metabolism, the diving reflex, sensory structures for detecting prey, wave properties of acoustics, trophic pyramids, and bioaccumulation of toxins in long-lived predators. Oh yes, and orca forensics.
Next Generation Science Standards
By downloading this curriculum, I agree to complete the educator surveys and pre- and post-assessments with my students.
UNIT PLAN
The unit plan for chapter 6 comes in 3 parts. You may download and print each one or follow along on your computer where all links to external websites and documents will be live at your fingertips. Here you will find NGSS, Learning Targets, Success Criteria, what to prep, and a list of materials and online resources you will use in the lessons, activities, games, and labs that will help students explore the essential question they choose.
A rhinoceros auklet flies into the deep
STUDENT JOURNAL
This is your students’ place to wonder, record observations, take notes, diagram, and plan and record scientific investigation or engineering processes. It will scaffold each step of learning, but give the locus of control to the students as they explore. It is also a place to celebrate hard work with well-deserved stamps on the back page.
HOW TO PRINT
In Microsoft Word, click on the Layout menu, scroll down to Pages options, and select ‘Book fold’ in the drop down menu by ‘Multiple pages.’ Print in landscape orientation on 8.5 x 14” paper with two staples along the center fold.
SLIDESHOW
Use these PowerPoint slides with video and resource links as an aid to help guide, but not dominate, your learning progression. Feel free to modify content and add or remove slides to best fit your learning goals. Where there are place-based maps, videos, or project examples, replace with similar content, specific to your school’s region or relevant to your students’ lives and interests.
PRE-ASSESSMENT
Gauge pre-existing knowledge and interest with this brief quiz. When the unit is finished, don’t forget to take the post-assessment. Classroom teachers, use student achievement data gathered from these assessments for a TPEP Cycle of Inquiry.
WONDER
Give your students a visual or sensory experience that provides a chance to wonder at the ability of humans to act like marine mammals. This may be a hands-on outdoor activity, an observational field trip, or an in-classroom presentation, a still photo, or video, like the one in the link below, to invoke curiosity about a phenomenon students can’t wait to try to solve.
A mermaid? Or free-diver, Snow McCormick, coming up for air.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
After watching the video above, use their curiosity from that and the information from their reading of Ch 6 to develop an essential question around the mystery or problem they’d like to solve. Guide this one to be about adaptations for diving
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Once you have established an essential question, the information-gathering begins... or continues. Background research will begin with the reading of the book and continue through the games and activities described in the unit plan. In this link you will find a few more resources students may need along the way. Of course, you’ll come back to this step throughout the process, as your questions and claims will require support.
DEVELOP A TESTABLE QUESTION
This is when your students take that larger essential question and distill it down into specific, testable question. The most direct questions begin with, “Is, Are, Do, Does, or Will…”
PUT SCIENCE TO WORK
Identify variables, design a procedure, carry out an investigation, analyze data, and see where active discovery leads. To answers? Solutions? More questions to test? Or maybe even back to the drawing board to start all over again. The scientific process is never linear and never ends, but it is always an adventure! The resources in The Real Process of Science website explain the whole deal. And the How Science Works interactive diagram is a tool your students can use to track their own process, then turn it straight into a slideshow, photos, text, and all. Pretty slick!
In this unit, there are two opportunities for scientific investigations, one in Part 1 with the dive reflex and one in Part 3 with orca forensics.
How Science Works Diagram, by UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology
COMMUNICATE YOUR FINDINGS
This is a crucial part of the scientific process. It is the part where the results of all your hard work can make a difference. This may be a difference in the choices a few citizens make each day to help the sea or a new bill on the Senate floor that changes the way our whole state helps the whales. Find communication options for this unit at the end of the student journal.
POST-ASSESSMENT
At the end of the unit, administer this post-assessment and record the results, then calculate the difference between the pre- and post-assessment scores to measure student growth for the individual and the whole class.