How
High Can You See Monarchs as They Fly Overhead? |
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Overview | |
In this lesson, students use observation and critical thinking skills to try to answer a question about monarch flight. Then they dig deeper by setting up or reading about a related experiment. | |
Teaching Ideas | |
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." |
Have students use this handout to record their thinking. |
2)
Design an Experiment
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Try the Monarch Migration Eye Test! |
3)
Reflect in Science Journals
Have students refect on this in their science journals. Look for students to understand that monarch migration can be invisible to us. Monarchs can fly as high as two miles above the Earth. We can't see monarchs when they fly more than about 300 feet high. When we watch migration from the ground, there is a large gap overhead where monarchs can travel and we can't see them. Therefore, nobody knows for sure how high monarchs fly during their long migration. Our ability to observe migration is quite limited. |
We can't
see monarchs from the ground when they fly in the two-mile high gap shown.
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4)
Consider Implications for Journey North's Monarch Study |
Journey North tracks migration based on visual observations. This migration map only shows what people saw. |
5)
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! |