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| Teachers'
Guide for October 20, 2006 |
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| This
Week |
| The
following activities accompany this week's topic:
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Have
students use this handout
to record their thinking. |
1)
Encourage Critical Thinking
Give your students time to ponder how they could use the photos
to help answer the question. Do they come up with the idea to
look for something familiar in each picture and then use relative
size to come up with an answer? Is their reasoning sound? For
example, "I can see a U.S. flag in the picture but I can
hardly see its stars (at 500 feet). A monarch is much smaller
than the blue portion of the flag, so I don't think I would
see a monarch." 2)
Reflect in Science Journals: Read this statement
from Monarch scientist Dr. Bill Calvert: "On the best
migration days we often see the fewest butterflies. On the
worst days we often see the most."
Have students refect on this in their science journals.
 3)
Design an Experiment: Where, between 0 and 500
feet, do monarchs disappear from view? Before
reading the two experiments described
here, considering having students set up their own. Here's
one approach:
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Attach a preserved monarch or life-sized monarch photo
to an off-white piece of paper or cardboard. (That background
will approximate clouds.)
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Mount
the image on a fence post or other pole in the schoolyard.
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Walk
backward until you can no longer make out the monarch.
Ask students, Did we all stop at the same place? Why
or why not?
- Measure
the distance from the stopping point(s) to the post.
- Ask,
What can you conclude? What other factors might make it
easier or harder to see a real monarch in the sky? Possible
answers: brightness, fog, movement, numbers of butterflies.
 4)
Implications for Journey North's Monarch Study:
Discuss how data is collected for Journey North's
monarch migration maps. Ask, If monarchs disappear from
view at a few hundred feet high, how might that affect the
monarch migration data, maps, and conclusions?
As a class, pay attention to how Journey North describes
the migration maps and the progress. The wording should
be explicit about the observation ("according to observers"
or "based on what the fifth graders saw"). It
should not go beyond what the data support. Watch out for
phrases such as, "there are no monarchs south
of the border."
5)
How High is High? Make a Classroom Model! This
activity invites students to create a classroom chart, to
scale, that depicts the heights of everything from trees
to monarchs to jets! >>
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