Can a fish pay for your college education?
This lesson will guide students through learning about Lake Whitefish, a valuable fish for commercial fishermen, and how climate and profit impacts fishermen’s livelihood. Students will learn facts about whitefish, learn about local fishing businesses, and apply what they’ve learned using economics to decide whether their business can continue to stay open with different scenarios.
Game of Survival: Fish Style!
Students will play a game of survival by creating fish with dominant and recessive traits to understand how evolution through adaptations of structures and functions help with survival and continuation of genetic variations.
Formation of Lake Superior
Students will put on a play to go through the steps of how Lake Superior formed by rifting of the Minnesota shore from the Wisconsin shore, erosion of mountains that were created from the rifting, and filling of the rift zone. Optional: discuss how the formations of Lake Superior also resulted in the formation of the different types of igneous (volcanic, from rifting and volcanic activity) and sedimentary (from sedimentation, or build up, of sediments from eroded mountains and other rocks) rocks we find in Lake Superior.
Sum of the Rivers
Students will see maps of Lake Superior and the St. Louis River to compare the sizes. Students will then each draw a portion of either the St. Louis River or a river near their school that flows into the St. Louis River or Lake Superior. They will make connections that every part of the river can impact the health of the rest of the river and of Lake Superior.
Guess that Animal!
Students will work in teams to read about an animal that lives in the St. Louis River Estuary. They will then work together to draw and name the animal that they think the description describes. This allows students to become familiar with animals that could be present around their school or homes that live in the estuary while also learning valuable lessons in team work.
Construct a Cell
Students will gather items they can find in nature to put as parts in a cell. The catch is that students must explain why that item represents the cell organelle by using metaphors, similes, or other explanations. Prerequisite: Students must have a firm understanding of cell parts and functions. This lesson would be great as a unit wrap-up lesson. An example would be that an acorn could represent a vesicle because it transports seeds to other places in a protective casing like a vesicle transports proteins in a cell.
Online Resources for Data, Kits, Information and More!
The curriculum attached is actually a list of websites you can find useful for you and your students. Some of the websites will give you access to data that you can give to your students, other websites (like the WI DNR EEK!! website) provides information that your students can use (and is age appropriate for elementary/middle school). Other websites provide great kits or other resources.
Keep the Water Clean!
Students will learn about different types of pollution that can be present in water, ways those types of pollution can be handled, what Areas of Concerns are, and what can be done to clean up (and keep clean) Areas of Concerns in the St. Louis River Estuary.
Making a Watershed!
This lesson outline and PowerPoint guide you and your students through learning about watersheds by making your own! Students will make their own landscape and hypothesize where water and land are on their landscape. They can add places of human activity and predict what will happen to their watershed when it "rains"! This is a fun, short activity that can be extended to emphasize key ideas. The Enviroscape from the Great Lakes Aquarium is optional but very useful for this lesson!
Thompson Reservoir Investigation Lesson
Attached is a lesson plan and worksheet for investigating Thompson Reservoir. This will prepare students for a more detailed chemistry investigation by gathering a physical inventory of the Reservoir and a chance to experience a virtual overview of the upstream watershed. The lesson also introduces the study of sediments. Use the curricula titled "Google Earth Tour of the St. Louis River" for the virtual tour. Sediment core is optional.
