Wetlands Life

Grade Levels: 3 - 5

Introduction
Open your eyes wide to the wonder of wetland whooping cranes!

Objectives

• Students learn about an endangered wetland animal's life cycle and habitat.
• Students learn about an animal preservation project.
• Students use nonfiction text to answer literal and inferential questions.

Suggested Time Allowance
50 minutes

Materials

• Activity worksheets: Why Are Whooping Cranes Endangered? and Photo Gallery
• Websites: Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/default.htm); Why Are Whooping Cranes Endangered? (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/why.htm); and Photo Gallery (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/photo.htm)
• Crayons, colored pencils, or markers

Procedures

1. Introduce key vocabulary: wetlands, extinction, endangered, ecosystem, habitat.

2. Ask students to visit the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/default.htm). The Youth Conservation Corps employs 15- to 18-year-olds to work at this Maryland research site where they provide a safe environment for cranes to nest and fledge before releasing them to the wild.

3. The website provides a great deal of information on Why Are Whooping Cranes Endangered? (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/why.htm). Have students read the information on this page to answer the literal (In the Book) and inferential (In Your Mind) questions on the Why Are Whooping Cranes Endangered? activity sheet. These questions will expand their thinking about how habitat and animal life cycles are interdependent.

4. Visit the Photo Gallery (http://whoopers.usgs.gov/photo.htm) to see photographs with captions telling about the cranes at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Students will read clues on the Photo Gallery Worksheet to help them find various photos, read their captions, and answer questions about them.

5. On the back of the Photo Gallery activity sheet, students will be directed to click on photographs of whooping crane chicks at -1 day old (still in the egg), 1 day old, and 11 days old. This will give students a glimpse of a whooping crane's birth and development process.

Assessment
Check answers on the worksheets.

Extension Activities

• Use the Internet to learn more about wetland ecosystems and animals. You may want to focus on the San Francisco Bay Area wetlands or wetland conservation.
  
  
• Make whooping crane sculptures: Use wadded newspaper and masking tape to form a whooping crane head, neck, and body. Cut out a beak using card stock or poster paper and tape it onto the crane sculpture. Use wire to make legs and tape them to the body. To make the wings, use card stock or tag board and tape them to the body. Cover the sculpture with tissue paper pieces (white, black, and red) using a water, white glue, and starch mixture (spread on with a paint brush) to make the tissue stick. To give texture (especially on the wings) students may crinkle the tissue paper as they lay it on. Eyes and other details can be painted or collaged on after the tissue dries.
  
  
• Make a diorama that shows a shoreline wetland environment, from the low tide line up to the grass areas above the high tide line. List plants and animals that live in each of these zones.
  
  
• Use field guides to do research on wetland birds.
  
  
• Read wetland-related books like Squish! A Wetland Walk, by N. Luenn (Atheneum) or Vanishing Habitats, by T. Hare (Gloucester Press).