For each respective space in the grid shown on the worksheet, prepare a note card that has the same list of living things. Then tape or tack the note cards, face down, to a large version of the same grid. Number the paper scraps 1 through 25.
Time Allotment
30 minutes
Materials
- writing board
- 25 small scraps of paper
- a bowl or hat
- a marker and a pencil
- Taming Wild Lands worksheet
PROCEDURE
Tap Prior Knowledge
1. Ask the students if it is possible for a family to live in a house without ever leaving and without ever bringing anything into the house from the outside. Of course not! People need more room than just what's in their houses or apartments because they need to grow or buy food, get things from other people, and get out to play!
Share with Neighbor
2. Ask the students, "Do plants and animals need a lot of room as well?" Ask them if they can come up with reasons why other living things would need more space than just somewhere to "hang their hats." Encourage them to think about all the things that people do that require lots of space. When people live together, they need a lot of space together in one place. The same goes for animals and plants, and they also need to get food, protection, and community stability from the space around them.
Hands-on Activity
3. Tell the students that they are farmers who have arrived from another country to an unsettled territory. They are going to plant their farms on the land. Tell them that when they arrived at this land, it was a combination of prairie, wetland, and forest.
4. Put the numbered scraps of paper in the hat or bowl. Select a volunteer to pick randomly ten of the twenty-five numbered scraps of paper. After each selection, write an X with a pencil in a corner of the card that has been chosen. After ten cards have been selected, flip over all the rest of them. The species that lived in the selected boxes have been eliminated from those spaces. Any box which is not touching another box containing the same species dies out; flip it over in order to show this. If a large area of a species gets split in half by the farmland, then each box that touches the modified area loses its species as well; again, flip over these cards. Students may look under the cards that were selected in order to find out what lived there. Note the number of boxes that were eliminated by establishing 10 squares of farm land.
5. Select another volunteer and run the game again, noting the differences between the two outcomes.
Introduce Scientific Principle/Environmental Issue
6. Explain to the students that plants and animals often need a large amount of space in which to live. Prairie-dwelling animals, such as bison, need a large expanse of prairie so that they don't exhaust the supply of prairie plants on which they graze. The prairie plants, such as Canada wild rye and big bluestem, also need a large space in which to grow so that the animals that eat them don't eat them completely.
Some plants depend upon wind to spread their seeds or upon insects and birds to spread their pollen over a large number of plants. For this reason, the seeds and pollinators must be able to fly throughout the area where these plants grow. If several small areas where such plants grow are too far away from one another for seeds and pollen to be carried from one to another, then they cannot cross pollinate or seed each other.
Animals and plants such as bison and big bluestem need not only large amounts of space, but large amounts of unbroken space. If there is something, such as a farm, that prevents bison from getting to the food that they need or the seeds from getting to the ground where they can grow, then the populations may decline or even go extinct. Birds that cannot find suitable forest habitat to live in are susceptible to cow birds, which steal nests from other birds and lay their own eggs in them. Cow birds find nests by looking in trees at the edges of forests.
7. Explain to the students that the settlement of the Midwest with large farms has caused the declines of many kinds of animals and plants. Cutting down forests not only destroys the forest habitat in the place where the timber was cut, but it also often increases the total length of forest edges and opens up corridors for invaders, such as the brown-headed cowbird, allowing predators to get to the animals that once found refuge among the trees. When farmers fill or drain wetlands, several kinds of birds lose their habitats, and the function of flood mitigation and water filtering is lost, which threatens the surrounding habitats with more devastating floods and contaminated water supplies. When farms are placed in the middle of a large area that was used by a population, the two smaller areas that remain on the opposite sides of the farm may not be sufficiently large to support the populations. For this reason, using a small amount of land may have disastrous consequences for a large number of living things.
Relate Activity and Concept
8. In the activity, the students chose randomly the land to be farmed. Ask the students how they think farmers who first settled in the Midwest selected their sites. They looked for sites that were close to water and that had good soil and timber for energy and building material. Most settlers did not stop to think about the impact that their farms were having on the ecology of the land.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of the lesson, the students will be able to:
- understand that populations have different habitat needs than individuals.
- tell why it is important for wild animals and plants to have access to large areas of land.
- see how settling on wild land impacts the species which lived there.
