Squirrels Lesson Plans
Squirrels are a wild animal urban kids may know as well as rural ones. Get ready for Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21st with some literacy lesson plans.
Read some books:
- The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri
- Squirrel’s New Year’s Resolution
- Nuts to You! by Lois Ehlert
- Gray Squirrel at Pacific Avenue – a Smithsonian’s Backyard Book
Online resources with background info:
- National Geographic has photos, maps, and background info.
- The Squirrel Place has a cartoon picture kids can roam around and click on for mouse practice.
- BBC Nature has lots of photos and information
- Scientific American reports on “Project Squirrel” in a very accessible article.
- Squirrel field guide is great for backyard or schoolyard observation.
- Learn to say squirrel in hundreds of languages. This is a fairly frivolous exercise, but as a linguistics student, I learned that “squirrel” is an odd word in many languages. As far as I know, there is no official explanation for this fact, so you might as well enjoy it and get a little global awareness out of it.
- Practice S and Q with a worksheet.
- Jan Brett’s Rodent Worksheet includes squirrels.
Let students explore these books and websitesand collect information about squirrels. Then have each student write a sentence (or, for older students, a paragraph or essay) about his or her favorite squirrely discovery. Older students can write about how their new knowledge meshes with their prior experience of squirrels.
Step it up with classic squirrel literature.
Henry David Thoreau described the squirrels near his home in New England:
Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.
This makes a good passage for practice with deciphering difficult language, since it describes something familiar to many students. Divide students into groups and give each group a sentence to figure out and rewrite in their own words. There are only half a dozen sentences, and the first few are fairly short.
Finish with a writing assignment. Squirrels are fairly common school mascots (that’s the Hendrix College Flying Squirrels below). Now that they’ve learned about squirrels, how do students feel about squirrels as a team mascot? How do squirrels compare with other mascot animals like tigers and lions?
Leap Day Lesson Plans
Leap Year comes every four years, and each Leap Year has a Leap Day, February 29th. Celebrate it in the classroom and take advantage of a good opportunity to brush up calendar skills.
Enjoy our free full color leapday bookmarks.
Carson Dellosa makes seriously cute frog bulletin boards. Myra Grayson taught us to add google eyes to these frogs and it does in fact make them even cuter:
- Big Frog Bulletin Board Set
- Frog Calendar Set Bulletin Board Set
- Weather Frog Bulletin Board Set
- Birthday Frog Bulletin Board
- Leap into Learning mini bulletin board set
- Colorful Cutouts – Frogs
Leapday bulleton boards are easy. You can “Leap into a good book,” but you could also “Leap into Math” or “Leap into the Industrial Revolution.” “Leap into Learning” can go with any subject. “Love that Leap” is a great slogan for improvement or progress toward a goal.
We like frogs to illustrate this kind of saying (they come ready-made), but you could also use kangaroos, rabbits, or human jumpers. Here is a simple image of a long jumper and here’s one of a jumping rocker, if you need some inspiration for your own bulletin board drawings.
One more — Trend’s Frogtastic bulletin board set is another with a “Leap into Learning” motto included.
Herewith, some leap year links:
- The Royal Museum at Greenwich has a very clear explanation of leap years. Check out our Mesopotamia Lesson Plans for more resources on changes in the calendar, including a proposed new calendar that does away with leap day.
- Frog lessons can fit into a Leap Day or Leap Year classroom theme. One idea we’ve seen in a lot of places is playing Hot Potato with a toy frog, explaining that a frog will hop away if you don’t toss it quickly.
- Here is a video showing exactly how to make that jumping origami frog, in case you’ve had trouble mastering it in the past.
- Here is a very cool page about Leap Day. We like the fact that it includes our favorite leap year scene, the one in The Pirates of Penzance. Act out the scene in question as a nice advanced Reader’s Theater! It contains the following useful explanation of leap day:
| “For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal, | |
| Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal, | |
| Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, | |
| twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty, | |
| One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty. | |
| Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the | |
| agency of an ill-natured fairy – | |
| You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, | |
| on the twenty-ninth of February; | |
| And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover, | |
| That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, | |
| you’re only five and a little bit over!” | |
If you have students who were born on Leap Day, have a birthday party — they only get to celebrate their birthdays every four years.
Football Math
Football is all about math. Players’ rankings, points, yards, penalties — it’s all numbers. Even the music played by the band is full of quarter notes and eighth notes. You can just pull examples from football when you’re using a football theme, or when you have a class that’s excited about football. You can save time, instead, by using what’s already available.
Here’s a roundup of football themed math games and puzzles. We’ve scoured the web and found you all the good stuff. Most are interactive — we’ve told you when they’re not.
Online resources:
- Tackle Math Ball
- basic calculations
- lots of good football math from NCTM
- a hands-on in-class math football game
- math problems based on actual football
- decimals place value
- adding fractions — just like the previous game, but with different problems
- a simple online game for integers — noisy, but you can turn off the sound
- a DIY board game in a PDF file
- CoolMath’s football games
- an extended word problem on yardage — use the numbers from any game to repeat the exercise
- a clever use of a football field thought problem to illustrate Pythagorean theorem
- an advanced mathematical puzzler
Books:
- an enormous PDF file from the Pro Football Hall of Fame with lots of football math.
- Fantasy Football and Mathematics: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents, Grades 5 and Up
- Football: The Math of the Game
October Bulletin Boards
If you do Halloween in your classroom, Halloween is a great bulletin board theme for October. There’s a new Happy Halloween Bulletin Board from Susan Winget:
We like the cheerful retro look.
Eureka has a new Halloween bulletin board set with the Peanuts characters:
If Halloween isn’t a good choice for your classroom, there are plenty of classic autumn symbols that make great bulletin boards.Fall leaves are easy and enduring, with ready-made options from Trend’s Disney-like Big Oak Tree Bulletin Board Set to Scholastic Reading Genres Tree.
Pumpkins are always popular. The new Teachers Friend Pumpkin Puzzle Bulletin Board Set has photo pumpkins, including a big one cut into puzzle pieces. Scholastic Pumpkin Patch Accent Punch-Outs includes lots of shapes and sizes,with pleasantly sinuous vines. Carson Dellosa Pumpkin Patch Bulletin Board is a D.J. Inkers design with a scarecrow and mouse as well as pumpkins.
Carson-Dellosa has a new Owl design:
Teacher’s Friend Whooo Are You? has slightly more realistic owls.
Prefer DIY? Here’s our monster bulletin board, for some slight spookiness without an overt Halloween theme.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day
Avast, me proud beauties! Are your classrooms seaworthy? Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I know you won’t want to miss it.
Our Pirate theme page has lots of links and resources.
It’s too late for bulletin board suggestions, so let’s jump right into online resources:
- The Offical Site.
- The Pirate Translator.
- The Pirate Name Generator (mine is Aetheflaed Tarred Tongue, and I dare ye to tell me yours, me hearties!)
- A collection of pirate jokes, and a set of pirate haiku verses.
- A pirate glossary to get you started.
- Pirate lesson plan collection.
We’ll also give you our Pirate Thesis worksheet for free in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s a worksheet from our forthcoming Pirate Adventure writing unit. Double up on adjectives, growl a little, and shout “Shiver me timbers!” now and then, and you’ll be set.
