A Little Bit More
You’ll notice we haven’t told you the name of that strange animal on the unit poster – see if you can find it in a field guide. This animal is a bit unusual but if you look in the right field guide, you should be able to figure it out. We’ll give you a hint to get you started but you probably don’t need it. Count the animal’s legs. OK, hope that helps!
I can’t encourage you enough to include some field guides in your library to help with identification of what you see in nature. Field Guides provide a great deal of information in very little space and can be taken with you whenever you choose. Granted, once your field guide has provided the basics for your “unknown” organism you’ll need to go elsewhere to get more in-depth information but a field guide gives you a wonderful starting point. I realize also that when you don’t have ANY idea whatsoever what you’re looking at, a field guide can be a bit difficult to navigate. However, once you’ve used one for a time, you’ll quickly become proficient at using it and your knowledge of the natural world will increase greatly.
Roger Tory Peterson is well known as the person who developed a user-friendly field guide that relied on key characteristics of organisms to be identified. Today, this technique is used in a wide variety of field guides to help people quickly and easily identify animals and plants. Field guides typically group organisms taxonomically (organisms that are most closely related are grouped together) and the key characteristics that separate one organism from another are highlighted in some fashion. Today the internet is an especially good source of information on animals and plants but before you can look on the internet you’ll need to know the name of the organism in question and that’s where a field guide comes in handy.
Check out the field guide sets that the Peterson Institute offers (on the Electronic Naturalist home page). These will get you started if you don’t already have some.
Activities
Science & English – Check it out
Objectives: Experience using a field guide
Materials: Field guide to insects and/or field guide to several animal groups
We all know that the internet provides an enormous amount of information at the touch of our fingers. However, one needs to be able to search for that information with one or more words/names/terms appropriate to the subject we’re searching for or the task is impossible. A field guide can do just that – get you started with a name of an organism to begin your information journey.
It seems to me that the best activity for this unit is to determine the animal’s identity on our unit poster! We purposely didn’t identify the animal so you could do it yourself. So, let’s give it a try!
Activity #1 for grades 5-8
1. First off, we know this animal isn’t a mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian or fish, so it must be an invertebrate. (animal without backbone)
2. Second, we can easily see that this animal has six legs (we don’t think any legs are missing either) so we can figure that we’re looking at an insect. This will take us to an insect field guide
3. Now that we have an insect field guide, we can begin to look through this book to narrow down our possibilities. The more familiar you are with this guide, the more quickly you can eliminate those groups (orders) of insects that you’re pretty sure aren’t correct. For example, since this animal has four wings, it wouldn’t be a kind of fly (flies only have two wings).
4. Once you’ve eliminated the “I’m pretty sure this isn’t the correct group it should be included in”, you can concentrate on those groups (orders) that are left. Your search may simply be a page by page search of the field guide but that’s just fine – whatever works.
HINT: Since many of our insects have common names based on what they look like or their behavior or make people think of, this can sometimes be an easy way to begin looking. Of course, common names have lots of pitfalls so this may lead you astray if you’re not careful. Good luck!
Science - Identify This
Objectives: Experience using a field guide
Materials: Several different field guides, ability to make photo copies of different organisms
Activity #2 for grades K- 4
For the younger students be sure to walk them through this exercise so they can see how it’s done.
1. Acquire one or more field guides (insects, mammals, birds, reptiles/amphibians, spiders) and select some photos of animals that are likely to be found in your area (use some general discretion on this)
2. Make photocopies (1 per student or 1 for each group of students) of your chosen animals but be sure to delete any accompanying text – just the picture of the animal
3. Have the students take their “mystery” animal and see if they can figure out what it is by using one of the field guides you’ve already assembled. If you’re using multiple guides, you may not even want to tell them which one to look in – let them figure this out for themselves
4. Once they’ve found what they think is their mystery animal, have them check with you and if correct, they can use the guide to write down the name of the animal and any other information you think helpful right next to the copied illustration.
Key Concepts
Structures and Functions, Identification
Questions
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