So my school has an end of the day advisory period every day. When we were in school this used to be a 10 minute block where students would rush back to homeroom to put their laptop on the charger for the night before heading home. In this crazy virtual setting this year, it has turned into a 25 minutes period in case we go back and have to do two runs of the buses.
My team meets all together on one zoom with all 100 of our kids (when they all show up of course). As you could imagine keeping 7th graders entertained for the last 25 minutes of the day can be energy consuming and coming up with new ideas gets old quickly.
One of the best activities we have done with our kids are virtual field trips and my favorite one by far is Arizona State University’s Ask a Biologist Virtual Tours.
The website includes tours of a desert, savanna, tropical rainforest, temperate forest, and tundra currently but they are working on a freshwater one currently! What’s great about the website is that you can do as much or as little with the tours as you want.
Once you decide how you want to use it with your students make sure you take a few minutes to familiarize them with the navigation tools. The website provides them a key but it is important to make sure they are all aware.
The tours are accessible by computer, tablet or phone so all of your students should be able to access them. Encourage them to turn their volume up loud enough to hear the sounds of each ecosystem!
As I mentioned, I used it during my advisory period. We had just learned about the different types of ecosystems so I gave my kids free reign to explore. As they moved through each ecosystem I brought up different questions to get them thinking about topics we had covered.
Desert
- What kind of plants do you notice?
- Have you spotted any animals? Why might they be harder to see during the day?
- How does the cactus protect the baby birds?
- Have you found the snake? How do you know?
Savanna
- What are they doing to the tree?
- What kind of symbiosis do the ants and the tree have?
- What are some animals you see?
- Why is the grass so yellow right now?
- Which animal makes a whooping sound? Why might it be making that sound?
Tropical Rainforest
- What do you notice about the amount of plants in this ecosystem compared to the others? Why do you think this is?
- With so many trees, do we need to look more than just around us? What about above?
- Why do you think it is harder to spot animals in this ecosystem?
Temperate Forest
- How does temperate relate to it showing you multiple seasons?
- What differences do you notice between the seasons?
- What is that sound? Hint look at Fall and listen for the elks.
Tundra
- Who is surprised by the amount of flowers?!
- Why aren’t there any trees?
- What do you notice about the sounds? Why is the wind so loud?
- It seems like there are less animals here but have you found any?
Extension Activities
As I mentioned early I used this very informally with my students. They enjoyed getting to explore the places we had been discussing in class. When they discovered something they were excited to share it with the rest of our team over the zoom chat.
Want to do more with this? You definitely can! Each virtual tour would make a great webquest. The site also has information pages going over an overview, the anatomy, the animals, and the plants of each ecosystem.
Want to do less? I know it sounds silly but it’s ok to do less sometimes. Keep this for your early finisher kids or add it to your class page as an extension resource.
No matter how you chose to use it, these tours do a great job of bridging our classroom to the real world. As much as I would love to take my students to see the tundra in Iceland, something just tells me it’s not in the budget.