Teaching science in elementary school is crucial for nurturing young minds. But as educators, finding the time and resources to create engaging lessons can be a challenge. That's where this podcast comes in.

Welcome to Naturally Teaching Elementary Science, the show dedicated to supporting elementary teachers in their quest to bring authentic and place-based science experiences to their classroom. I'm Victoria Zablocki, a certified elementary teacher turned outdoor educator. With over a decade of experience coaching teachers on effective science teaching methods, I'm passionate about making science accessible, understandable, and fun for educators and students alike.

Join me as we explore strategies for teaching science in elementary school with practical teaching tips, insightful interviews, picture book reviews, and more. Whether you've taught for a long time or just started your teaching journey, this podcast is your trusty resource for enhancing your science curriculum. So let's grow together.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science podcast. My name is Victoria Zablocki and I'm your host. So before we get into today's episode, I wanted to take a second to share a review from SSSadler on Apple Podcasts.

They said, “So many great ideas using nature along with science and ELA activities for inside or outside classrooms. A definite subscribe for this preschool teacher!” To SSSadler, thank you so much for taking your time to write such kind words. I appreciate any feedback at all.

So if you've been listening and you have some ideas for topics, guests or ways that I could make this podcast more helpful, please take time to leave a review on the podcast player that you listen on.

[1:46]

All right, so let's get into the episode. I want to hone in today on the fact that fall is a fantastic time to investigate the phenomenon of animal migration. Migration isn't just a fall phenomenon, it's also used in the spring by animals to return to their breeding grounds where they have all the resources they need to raise young. But at the time of this episode airing, fall migration is in full swing and is the perfect opportunity for you to get some real-time, place-based experience with migration. So in this episode, I'm going to describe animal migration activities for grades K through five. For each activity, I'll share the Next Generation Science Standard that inspired that activity, as well as the way the activity relates to animal migration. And make sure that you listen through to the end of the episode, because even though I've paired these activities to particular standards, you may find yourself inspired to use a similar concept for your curriculum or even use the same activity for a different grade.

Also, many of these activities would benefit from taking place outside. And if you're new to taking your students outside for learning, check out episode 6, 5 Outdoor Education Safety Tips for Teaching Outside. And that will give you suggestions to make teaching outside easier. All right, now let's get into it.

[2:59]

So for kindergarten, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was K-ESS3-3: communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air and or other living things in the local environment. So how does this standard relate to animal migration? Birds, in particular, face a lot of human-related obstacles when they migrate, including things like wind turbines, communication towers, windows in houses and tall buildings, destroyed or removed wetlands, light pollution, noise pollution, power lines, pesticides, hunting and free-roaming outdoor cats.

So a fantastic activity to illustrate the impact of humans on nature and to enhance your students' understanding is to put together a migration obstacle course. So to set up the obstacle course for your students, you'll want to create two defined side lines to represent the migration corridor that your students will migrate through. If you're planning to do this outside, you could use long ropes, cones or predefined space like a soccer field. But if you plan to play this inside in a gymnasium, make sure you use something like cones or the lines on the basketball court since rope would be a hazard on the slick floor.

Then you'll want to add good aspects to your obstacle course like poly spots or paper plates to represent stop oversights like a wetland or an open field. You'll also want to include something to represent a stand of trees for resting and shelter from weather. And then you might want to consider putting something at each end line to represent the benefit of migration for birds. So as an example, here in Michigan, I could put baskets to represent nests because in the spring, birds return here to breed. And then I could put something like milk jug caps or poker chips at the other end of the obstacle course to represent food since birds leave Michigan in the fall to go south for available food.

So to get your kiddos started, I would suggest having your students go through the obstacle course one time without any of the bad obstacles so that they get the feel of what birds need and what they expect their journey to be like. So they'll go through the obstacle course, they can stop at a stopover site if they want. That's a safe zone where they can rest if they need to. And then when they reach the other end line, which happens to be the southern state, they'll reach the food and they could pick up one poker chip to represent the energy they got from the food that they reached in the south. And then they could hold on to that food as they make their way back north again. Again, they could stop at those stop oversites if they need a rest.

And when they reach their nesting grounds, they can place their poker chip in the nest to show that the energy was spent on the journey and helped them get home. Alternatively, since they are kindergartners, you could just have the nests and food remain untouched and act as a visual for the locations and reasons for migration if you don't want to add the picking up of a poker chip and putting it into the baskets.

Then after they've flown from your home state south and back, add in a human-related obstacle that makes their journey harder, such as a student who represents a cat that can tag the birds inside the boundaries. So when a bird gets tagged, they die and sit to the side of the boundaries until the rest of the birds reach the end of their journey. Since kindergarteners are often impulsive and impatient, make sure that your students that were tagged get to return to the obstacle course at the first possible opportunity. This activity is to illustrate the impact humans have on an animal migration; it's not the typical rules of tag where they'll sit out the rest of the time.

If you wanted to add some math to the activity, you could collect data on how many human-related obstacles are included and how many birds survive and die each round. As you continue playing, add more obstacles into the course for the students to physically feel how difficult it becomes when there are multiple human-related barriers. If you add the math piece, they'll also be able to see how more obstacles make for more bird deaths.

And to end this activity on a positive note, or on a successive day if you don't want to do it on the first day, you could have your students voice solutions for the human-related obstacles that were introduced and then remove them from the course when an appropriate solution has been suggested. For example, to get rid of the threat of cats, bring cats inside. This role-playing exercise will give your students whole-body play and understanding of what birds experience, providing them with powerful memories to draw upon for science understanding.

[7:19]

For first grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 1-ESS1-2: make observations at different times of year to relate the amount of daylight to the time of year. How does this relate to animal migration?

Part of what tells an animal to migrate is the change in the amount of daylight. As summer dwindles, so does the amount of daylight, signaling to animals and plants that fall in winter on the way. On the flip side, when winter starts to fade, there's an increase in hours of daylight signaling to plants and animals that there will be more resources for them to be able to reproduce.

An activity that will help your students see the correlation between hours of daylight and the migration of animals is to do some data collection. The two types of data I would suggest collecting would be to look up sunrise and sunset times, and then go outside and collect data of migrating birds with your students once a day or every other day, around the same time and for the same amount of time. By keeping the time of day and the amount of time you collect the same, it gives you more reliable data, which is a skill that is helpful to teach even the youngest of scientists.

When your students are outside collecting migrating bird data, they should be looking for birds that are flying south, southeast or southwest and often in groups. When you first go outside, you'll have to take time to identify which direction is south and work together to look in that direction. There are a lot of birds that migrate at night, so you won't have the songbird species to watch out for, but you could likely see waterfowl such as geese, ducks, cranes and swans.

These groups of birds also tend to be the ones that fly in the typical “V” formation that many people think of when they think of migrating birds. So you'll want to provide each of your students a clipboard, a writing utensil and some paper, and have them watch the skies for a predetermined amount of time. I wouldn't say any more than 10 minutes since first graders have a short attention span and you want to make sure they stay engaged.

After collecting data individually, come together as a class and do some sharing. Agree upon how many migrating birds they think they saw as a class, either by taking the median number or by the teacher taking the average and rounding to the closest number. Keep a master recording sheet of each of the days you collected data and then revisit the master list when you've finished your data collection.

The duration of the study is up to you. You could take data for a couple of weeks or you could take data for a month or more. The more data points you have, the better your students will be able to see how the dwindling sunlight correlates with an increased number of migratory birds.

Also, if you only have a few data points and you run into days where you don't see any birds, that could make it challenging for the students to see any patterns. So if you have flexibility in your schedule, you as the teacher could keep an eye out for migratory birds throughout the day and determine what time you're typically seeing them, and that could be when you aim to go out and collect data with your students. After you've collected all your data points as a class, you could graph the data to be able to see the trends or you could simply look at the numbers and have your students look for patterns.

Either way, having a discussion about what the data shows us is an important part of the data collection process. Your students may not see any patterns and if a little bit of guidance doesn't help them get to your desired outcome, you could always take more data points and see if that helps your students find patterns.

[10:32]

For second grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 2-LS2-2: develop a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing seeds or pollinating plants. How does this relate to animal migration? One of the reasons we don't see butterflies in winter is because they don't have a food source, while the other main reason is because they're cold-blooded and they wouldn't be able to make their own heat to survive the cold temperatures.

So to keep their species going, some butterflies die, but their species survive the winter as larva or pupa. Other butterflies hunker down and enter diapause, which is a form of dormancy during the winter, and then some migrate to warmer locations that also have the nectar that they need. And because butterflies visit flowers to get nectar, they also accidentally pollinate the flowers they visit.

This is true of butterflies during their migration as well. As they move south towards the warmth and their food source, they have to stop and eat along the way. So a project that you and your students could begin this year that involves monarch migration would be to plan and put together a Monarch Waystation.

As defined by Monarch Watch, a Monarch Waystation is a place that provides resources necessary for monarchs to produce successive generations and sustain their migration. Essentially, it's a garden that has milkweed plants that monarchs can either have successful offspring or they can stop at on their migration both in the fall and in spring.

Fall is the optimal time to plant milkweed seeds. So starting to plan in early October and getting things in place by early November would give your students the opportunity to research the needs of monarchs on their migration journey, watch your available space to make sure it gets at least six hours of sun each day, obtain milkweed seeds and also get them planted. And to get your students excited about this project, you could read them the book Butterflies Belong Here: A Story of One Idea, 30 Kids and a World of Butterflies by Deborah Hopkinson. It's a fantastic story based on a real class of students that took interest in monarch butterflies and created their very own Monarch Waystation. So it could get your students pretty pumped up.

For some logistical help, you could check out Monarch Watch, a website dedicated to developing gardens specifically for monarch butterflies. And I'll make sure to put their link in the show notes. So check that out, naturallyteaching.com/episode20. They have helpful tips on how to successfully put together a Monarch Waystation, as well as a link to register your waystation, which would then give your classroom a certificate. And you could also purchase an official medal sign to place in your garden.

And if you're coming to this episode in the spring, and you're feeling like you missed an opportunity, I've got good news for you. Monarch Watch has an application process for free milkweed plugs for schools. So to describe the difference, plugs are already sprouted plants that you plant in the ground, and are the best option for success for planting milkweeds in the spring, whereas in the fall, your best chance for success is to plant seeds.

If you want to go this route, you'll need to prepare for the application by writing a description of your educational goals for the garden, a clearly defined long-term maintenance plan for the Waystation, picture proof of your proposed plot of at least 100 square feet with six hours of sunlight, a letter of support from your administration that shares that maintenance crews will not remove the plants from the Waystation space, and you'll have to be willing to commit to a follow-up survey in the fall for photo submissions and garden evaluations.

If you're feeling like this project will take a lot of money, you could always look into garden grants that could help fund your project. To help you out with this, you could check out my article, “Garden Grants and Plans: Where to Look for Funding and How to Prepare for Success”. There are a lot of garden grants out there for schools, so I would highly encourage you to take a look in the summer. You could also get in communication with a local nature center to see if they have any milkweed seeds they could donate to your school and possibly partner with you in your class to help get your Monarch Waystation up and running.

Once you have a Waystation established, you can use it for future students to be able to watch Monarch butterflies during their fall and spring migrations as they visit for a rest and food. This will give your students an outdoor lab where they can see pollination in real time, which is very powerful. They may even end up seeing the life cycle unfold before their eyes if you end up with resident Monarchs laying eggs on your plants. If you already have a Monarch Waste Station in place, you could set a consistent time to go outside and watch for Monarchs using a similar data collection process as I described for the first-grade migratory bird data collection earlier in this episode.

[15:03]

For third grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 3-PS2-3: ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other. You may be wondering how on earth does this relate to animal migration?

Oddly enough, reindeer are actually an example of an animal that relies on Earth's magnetic field to be able to guide their migration. So I knew some animals use the magnetic field, but I didn't realize reindeer were one of them. And something new that I learned for this podcast episode is that reindeer store iron in their hooves from eating wild mushrooms in the summer, which interacts with the Earth's magnetic field to help guide them.

So an activity to demonstrate magnetic pull being used by animals in their migration would be to create magnetic migration maps of reindeer. For this activity, you'll want to locate thick paper like cardstock or thin cardboard like the kind that Lunchables are packed in and provide some to each of your students. You'll also want to have stronger than refrigerator magnets like magnet wands, horseshoe magnets or bar magnets for each student to use.

Alternatively, if you don't have that many strong magnets, you could also make the testing of this activity a center and then you would only need a few. You'll also want to print out small pictures, maybe one inch by one inch of reindeer and give each of your students one of those as well. Have your students create migration maps for their small paper reindeer that include things like forests for shelter and lichen for food sources.

Then have them tape either a small magnet or a small piece of magnetic metal onto the back of their reindeer. Place the reindeer on top of their map and then use the strong magnet underneath their map to make their reindeer move across. For funsies, you could have your students swap maps with other students and try out their magnetic maps.

[16:55]

For fourth grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 4-ESS2-2: analyze and interpret data from maps to describe patterns of Earth's features. So how does this one relate to animal migration?

Scientists track and map the movement of animals during their migration. They find that animals use certain landmarks to guide their migratory routes, so by looking at migration maps, your students could surmise that there are important features like rivers, mountains and coastlines along those routes. So an activity you could conduct to help your students notice patterns of Earth's features is to look at migration maps and topographical maps and determine which landmarks are guiding birds during their migration journeys.

So to prep for this activity, you'll have to find bird migration maps for your students to reference, which you could find inside bird field guides like the Sibley, Audubon or Kauffman field guides. These have static range maps that will be easy for your students to reference and compare to topographical maps. Alternatively, you could use an online migration tracker, but a lot of these are dynamic and always changing, are unnecessarily interactive, and could be challenging for children to interpret.

Birdcast is a relatively simple tracking system that you could use if you wanted to use online tools and your students would likely be able to decipher the colors and their meanings. But one bummer part is that Birdcast is specifically for the United States and doesn't cover any other countries. I'll make sure to link that in the show notes though, if you're interested in Birdcast.

Another thing to prep would be to get enough topographical maps for each student or for every two students. Alternatively, you could look up the topography of your region online and compare that to the migration maps you've already pulled. You could even provide your students a blank copy of your country and have them fill in the notable landmarks from your country in addition to the migratory paths of five or more birds, so that they can visually see where there is interaction between geography and the birds.

After your students have a chance to come to their own conclusions about what landmarks are guiding these birds, have a class discussion about their findings. Depending on which species they research, they may have found that their birds follow the Mississippi River, while others may find their birds follow the Pacific Coast. As the teacher, you could create a master map on the projector, and once everyone who wants to share shares, you could talk about the patterns they see.

What sorts of landmarks appear to be guiding the birds? Are there more than one species using the same landmarks? You could then introduce them to your country's flyways. Here in the US, we have four major flyways. The Atlantic Flyway, which follows the Eastern Coastline, the Mississippi Flyway, which follows the Mississippi River, the Central Flyway, which follows the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Flyway, which follows the Western Coastline. By analyzing the range maps and the topographical maps, your students are putting together the puzzle of the flyways of your country, interpreting the maps and describing the patterns of Earth's features.

[19:54]

For fifth grade, the Next Generation Science Standard that I pulled was 5-ESS1-2: represent data and graphical displays to reveal patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky. So how does this one relate to animal migration? Some migratory animals use the stars to guide their way.

A lot of songbirds migrate at night, and so do migratory moths, so landmarks are not easy to see in the dark. Instead, these animals use the stars to find their way. Studies have actually been done where scientists release migratory birds in planetariums and change the orientation of the night sky, and the birds reorient themselves to Polaris, the north star that remains mostly fixed in the night sky. If you want to know more about the science behind animals following the stars during migration, make sure to check the show notes where I've linked an article titled “How Animals Follow the Stars” by the Royal Society of Great Britain. It's an interesting read.

An activity you could conduct to illustrate how seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky can help birds on their migration, would be to put together a navigation experience using stars to select direction. This is similar to how birds and moths use stars during their migration.

So to prep for this activity, print out multiple star maps for an October sky in your area that are all the same. And make sure to label them on the back so that you can remember which map is from fall. These October maps will create the path you want your students to take. Make sure to print an extra map so that you can show it to your students so they can examine that map in order to identify star patterns that will help them decide which path to take during your walk.

You'll also want to print out star maps that are from a different time of the year. I suggest something six months out, so maybe April. And these will mark the path that you don't want them to take. By using stars from a vastly different season, it's less likely they'll pick up on any patterns that are the same, and they won't end up as confused.

It would also help your students to self-correct if you added a sign down the incorrect path that said something like dead end, so they know to turn around and take the other direction. Then what you'll do is you'll have to place these maps either outside at forks of trails or sidewalks, or in the hallways of your building.

So to help your students navigate the correct way, you're going to place the October map in front of the correct path and place the April map the incorrect way. That way, when your students come to a fork along the path, they'll have to spot the star patterns to navigate correctly.

To give your students the best experience, ask for at least one other adult like a pair pro or a caregiver volunteer who can have eyes on the finish line of the navigation activity, and then you can follow behind the class making sure your students can be in view of a responsible adult.

Then send your students and pairs through the navigation activity. Make sure to have a discussion after the activity and talk about how easy or difficult it was to use the stars to navigate. If your students saw other “birds” or “moths” moving through the course before them, you can talk about how animals in the wild will follow other animals of their species during migration.

Another thing to consider for this activity is the speed at which your students can move. These types of activities definitely lend themselves well for running or speed walking. So you'll have to decide as the teacher if it's okay with you, or if you want them to walk through the course.

My hint to you, if you don't want to have to continue to tell students to walk over and over and over again, would be to take this activity outside and allow them to speed walk or even run, because they're gonna be super excited about navigation. When I was teaching compasses, it was the same way. Anytime there's navigation, there's running.

So I just suggest taking it and having it be an outside activity, where they can get some energy out and they can run.

[23:50]

So, in a nutshell, we talked about six different activities for teaching animal migration. For kindergarten, we talked about a migration obstacle course, where you introduce human-related obstacles. For first grade, we talked about data collection with hours of the day and migratory birds.

For second grade, we talked about creating a monarch way station that would help you collect data later down the line. For third grade, we talked about creating magnetic migration maps of reindeer.

For fourth grade, we talked about analyzing migration maps and topographical maps to be able to determine patterns of landmarks. And for fifth grade, we talked about using a navigation course with stars.

Thanks for taking time to listen today. I know you're busy, and the fact that you've chosen to spend your time listening to this podcast is wonderful. And don't forget, if you have a minute, please leave a review on whichever podcast platform you listen on to share your thoughts with me. Constructive feedback helps me get better, which will benefit all listeners alike.

If you have any questions, wonderings or animal migration activities that you use, get a hold of me on Instagram at Naturally.Teaching, or you can email me at victoria@naturallyteaching.com. And don't forget to check out the show notes for this episode at naturallyteaching.com/episode20, where I've put all the links for resources and articles and things that can help you with these activities. So thanks again for joining me today. And until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep naturally teaching.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science podcast. I hope you found it informative, inspiring, and full of actionable insights to enhance your science teaching journey. Connect with me on social media for more updates, science tidbits, and additional resources.

You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at naturally.teaching. Let's continue the conversation and share our passion for elementary science education together. Don't forget to visit my website at naturallyteaching.com for all the show notes from today's episode.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps me improve and reach more educators just like you. Thank you again for listening, and until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep naturally teaching.