Science Notebooking: Animal Adaptations

My students and I had a blast with our animal adaptations unit! The students loved being able to look at pictures, watch videos, and learn facts about real animals that they are interested in. Below are some picutres of how the unit played out in our learning journals.

 Title Page & Table of Contents

 Vocab Sheet 1 & Adaptation Intro Booklet

 Inside Adaptation Booklet

 Camouflage Notes & Questions (Super Teacher Worksheets)

Camouflage Pictures

 Mimicry Notes & Mimicking Animal

 Hibernation Notes & Acrostic Poem

 Hibernation Questions

 Migration Notes & Migration P.O.V. Story

 One of the Migration Question Pages

Adaptation Flipbook & Behavioral Adaptation Sort

 Adaptation Definition, Example, and Picture

 Physical & Behavioral

 Bottom Tier of Flipbook

 Vocabulary Book & Vocab Sheet 2

 Inside Vocabulary Book

 We did A LOT with vocabulary in this unit. There were 20+ words the students had to learn!

 Predator/Prey & Producer, Consumer, Decomposer Sort

I gave them sentences on a separate sheet of paper and they had to sort the items into the correct category for each.

 Carnivore, Herbivore, Omnivore Sort

 Food Chain Pictures

1. Food Chain with Arrow  2. Shows each animal inside their predator

 Food Chain Picture & Question Strip

 Population/Community Notes

 Habitat Notes

I learn so much about notebooking from every unit. From this unit I learned that I want to give them less worksheets and pages to glue in (partly because gluesticks have become like gold in my classroom...I don't know how they go so quickly!). Students did well and showed more creativity when I had them take and illustrate their own notes. I still give them direction, but I have learned that they do well with the freedom. Ex. After learning about Terrestrial, "Write yourself a note that will remind you about what terrestrial means, make sure to include the word "land" somewhere in your note."

If you are teaching a similar unit any time soon you may want to pop over to my Animal Adaptation Symbaloo page and take a look.

I would love to hear any thoughts or ideas!

Symbaloo Who?

So I may have been living under a rock for the past couple months because I jsut discovered Symbaloo. It is a visually amazing bookmarking site that I have already thought of many uses for. You could think of it as a more organized, easier to access, less picture-oriented pinterest. Not only am I in the process of creating my personal Symbaloo with all of the sites I frequent, but I have decided to make a class Symbaloo for my students. Again, I realize this may not be a new idea but I just discovered it so it's gold to me!

So far I have only made an Animal Adaptations webmix on Symbaloo. I plan on putting this on my classroom computer during Daily 6 for review or enrichment. I also thought about looking more into the SymblooEdu offers so I could have every student pull up a webmix on their computer in the computer lab one day to explore and research.

Please view my Symbaloo and give me any ideas or input you have for using this awesome site!

Click HERE to visit my Animal Adaptations Symbaloo