Scientific Inquiry

One of the science topics in the Grade 1 curriculum is about daily and seasonal cycles. Our class is incredibly interested in animals and how they like the seasons - especially the winter! Last week we created a guiding question to investigate.

Guiding question: Which animals like the winter?

Today we had a lot of fun investigating animals and whether or not they like the winter! We first created a set of criteria that would help us to explain why an animal may or may not like the winter. We  then thought about animals that we were certain enjoyed winter environments (polar bears, penguins, and seals) and watched video clips to compare what we saw with our criteria. We changed it a little bit to include some additional things (e.g., that animals that like winter wouldn't hibernate or migrate south, and that they may have an alternate way of staying warm, such as dense feathers).

A few students from our class scoured the library to find picture books and non-fiction books about animals and winter. We read the words and pictures in the books and made a list of animals that do and do not like winter and explained our reasoning. We can't wait to delve deeper into this learning to identify the different effects that seasons have on animals (e.g., changes in appearance, behaviour).