An introduction to habitats

As we have spent some time recently looking at the polar regions and endangered animals and visiting the Washington Wetland Centre and the Durham Botanic Gardens, I thought I would try to consolidate Harry's understanding of habitat. He understood everything very well so obviously has been taking in the previous discussions we have had! This was also preparation for a session we attended today at Gibside, a local National Trust property with other home ed families.

The botanic gardens have indoor cactus house and rainforest areas (where we saw banana and coffee plants) as well as outdoor woodland and meadow habitats.

We started by reading this book from the library, which covered the definition of habitat and looked in more detail at rainforest, woodland, desert, freshwater, seashore and meadow.

We read and talked about food chains and how they start with a plant. Harry came up with 

Leaf - aphid - ladybird

Grass - zebra - lion

We also talked about adaptation. We read about camels and cacti surviving in the desert and camouflage. We watched this YouTube video - I find rapping camels often stick in the memory! Harry also matched up adaptations to the correct animal to create this sheet (I can't for the life of me find the source of this printable to link back to it!). I asked him how each animal was adapted to its environment before showing him the adaptations and he got 4 of the 6 without any prompts.

We also used these lovely Melissa and Doug habitat sheets which have re-useable stickers of the animals found there. We created rainforest, ocean and grassland habitat scenes.