I already talked about our trip to grasslands/forest/pond. The desert was easy for us--we just took a little drive and went for a walk. We looked at the desert plants, felt the desert heat, and tried to hold still and be quiet enough to find some desert animals.
My plan for the polar habitat was to turn the thermostat way low and make it freezing in our house, but I totally forgot. The kids had to settle with the blubber glove. First, we filled the sink up with icy water. Then the kids each put their hand in to feel how cold it was. Then I made a blubber glove. I filled a ziploc bag with shortening then turned another bag inside out and stuffed it inside the other bag and zipped the two bags together. The kids could then stick their hand in the "glove" and put their gloved-hand into the icy water. We compared the difference. I was amazed at how well it worked.
After studying the ocean habitat, we took advantage of some BOGO tickets to the aquarium at Arizona Mills. My original thought was to go to California and spend a day at the beach searching for tide pools and after our trip to the aquarium I wished that we had stuck with that plan. There were some neat things to see there, but it wasn't worth the money. My favorite part was the tide pool.
We didn't go anywhere for the rain forest habitat. We used unfix cubes to compare the amount of rain we get here in the desert to the amount in the rain forest (8 inches here to 70-100 inches there).I tried something new with this unit--lapbooks. Each of the kids made a lapbook to document the things that they learned. The lapbook is a file folder folded a certain way that is full of mini-books and papers folded in different ways. Each thing in our lapbook contains information about habitats in general and something about each habitat.
We finished off our unit by sorting all of our animals into their correct habitats and talking about why each lived there and not another habitat.
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