Utilizing the Lake Superior watershed and the St. Louis River as a foundation for learning
As partners, students will work to understand materials about frogs. Then, partners will be separated to form two groups to play the amphibian trivia game. Students will learn about the importance of amphibians such as frogs as well as how frogs differ from toads.
This is a short guide to using measurements to figure out who left that track in the snow.
There are 5 critters from the Lake Superior watershed just waiting to meet you! A series of characteristics are read aloud, while guesses are taken, then the aquatic vertebrate is revealed.
Wild rice is a keystone species in the ecosystem. If it were removed, many other species would be negatively impacted. In our region, it is being threatened by a number of different factors, a couple of which, purple loosestrife and Canada geese, will be covered in this lesson. Students will act out a small scale ecosystem in order to learn about the issues facing wild rice in our area.
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.
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.
Students will discover the importance of Manoomin to the region and uncover a mystery about who has been eating the wetland plant. The curriculum resources are linked in the Teachers Guide.
Attached are teacher and student copies of a trout and its anatomy. When printed back to back, the copies can be folded so the external anatomy picture can be flipped up to reveal the internal anatomy picture.
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.
The attachments below are a "student copy" and a "teacher copy" of a guide to each exhibit at the Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth, MN. One purpose of this resource is as a school research project kick-off for students and their teacher. Another is developing a teaching unit, using student inquiry as your guide. This resource may also be used for digging in deeper to the exhibits through teacher-guided discussion, partner-group discussion, or individual reflection.