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Teachers' Corner
Ideas to use the Learning About Prairie Activities
1. When you tour Wolf Road Prairie be sure to visit every ecosystem.
To find their
locations, copy and print the map on the virtual tour.
2. Draw a mural in the classroom that shows how native people lived in
Illinois before Europeans arrived.
3. Choose a prairie plant and inquire from at least 3 sources to
discover how this plant will look in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
4. Bring the timeline with you when you visit the prairie. Try to imagine what
you would be seeing at different times.
Use the timeline descriptions to stimulate your thinking, then
draw at least one example as you imagine it may have looked.
5. During the last Ice Age, glaciers over the Chicago area were a mile thick.
Design a series of activities to help students grasp the size of the glaciers.
How long does it take to
walk a mile? How high are the highest buildings in Chicago? How many Sears Towers
stacked
on top of each other would be needed to make a mile? If the glacier came back, would it
cover the entire Loop? the entire city? How high above the tallest buildings would the
ice pile up? What would happen to the buildings? How would the climate change?
6. Using the Color Some Plants activity as an example, make up new questions
about several other prairie plants.
7. One of the Save the Prairie Society volunteers (Mary Cray) has prepared a bibliography of resources for teachers.
If you
have additional resources that we can add to this list, please email this informaiton to us at vdf19@email.msn.com.
Are you interested in attending a workshop with other teachers to learn
to use these
materials and to form a cadre for developing new materials for nature study and
action projects? If so, please
email us and share your ideas with us.
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