BioME: 5th grade Lesson Plan



BioME lesson plan: Tree of Life

BioME fellow: Kathy Gerst

Grade level: 5th (but could be adapted for any grade)

Concepts: students learn how groups of animals are related to each other, what the key characteristics are that separate the groups, how different characteristics arise through time, gain an understanding of the timeline of life through earth’s history.

Goal: students do research and presentations on a particular group of animals and put together a final “tree” with their research in the classroom.

Day 1: discuss “trees of life”: have them draw one that they think might be how animals are related to each other in science notebook (pre-assessment), show examples (powerpoint or overhead) of different trees, talk about how the various groups of animals can be closely or distantly related to each other. Discuss the time frame in which different groups first appeared on the planet according to the fossil record.

Day 2: Go through the different main/broad groups of animals briefly

Day 3: Assign students in pairs to work on one group of animals (Echinoderms, Molluscs, Annelids, Crustaceans, Insects, Sharks, Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals). Each group is given a standard worksheet to fill out and has to do research on the group. See attached sheet for what students had to find out.

Day 4 and 5: Students do presentations of their group to the whole class

Day 6: Review how trees of life look and the direction they move in time (100s of millions of years). Discuss how most of animals that have been on earth are now extinct but one way that we know how things are related is from fossils. Then, we drew a big tree on wall-size green paper and guessed where each of our groups were going to go on the ends of the branches of the tree. Each group came up and we attached their worksheet with photos to the correct branch (see photo). Finally, each student re-drew the tree into their science notebook and compared it with their original tree to see what was similar about their assumptions and what was different. We finished with a discussion about their assumptions going in to the lessons and what they have learned by comparing the before and after trees.

Other supplemental activities: (1) Bring in fossils for students to examine, try to identify (especially “key” features), and draw. Discuss how fossils form and why some plants and animals fossilize and leave better “records” than others. (2) Make a huge timeline of life on earth (see below) across classroom to gain perspective on how long ago life arose compared to how recently mammals, etc. appeared and especially humans. (3) This lesson ties in well with adaptation and natural selection lessons by discussing the differences in large and small changes within organisms through long and short(er) time periods.

Websites: ,

Photo of final product:

[pic]

TIMELINE OF LIFE:

The basic timeline is a 4.6 billion year old Earth, with (very approximately):

• 4 billion years of simple cells (prokaryotes),

• 3 billion years of photosynthesis,

• 2 billion years of complex cells (eukaryotes),

• 1 billion years of multicellular life,

• 600 million years of simple animals,

• 570 million years of arthropods (ancestors of insects, arachnids and crustaceans)

• 550 million years of complex animals

• 500 million years of fish and proto-amphibians,

• 475 million years of land plants,

• 400 million years of insects and seeds,

• 360 million years of amphibians,

• 300 million years of reptiles,

• 200 million years of mammals,

• 150 million years of birds,

• 130 million years of flowers,

• 65 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs died out and

• 2 million years since humans started looking like they do today.

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