Nature at Extremes: Great Salt Lake
Lesson Plans
Grades3, 4, 5Science
This resource has been reviewed by SubjectToClimate's climate scientists and verified for scientific accuracy and up-to-date information. Learn about our review process →
Provided by The Nature Conservancy
What it is
- This collection of lessons focuses on the Great Salt Lake and extreme environments, providing lessons about the water cycle, food webs, biological adaptations, and ecosystem challenges.
- Some of the activities include creating condensation, making a bird feeder, testing out different bird beak adaptations, exploring salt deposition, and coloring in a food web.
Teaching tips
Positives
- Students will love participating in the many hands-on activities included.
- Extreme environments should be interesting for students to learn about, particularly the adaptations that evolved in the species in those environments.
Prerequisites
- Before doing the "Wear the Water Cycle" activity, teachers should make sure the cereal is compliant with allergy and dietary restrictions in the classroom. Alternatively, teachers can use colored beads.
Differentiation & Implementation
- During the "Wear the Water Cycle" activity, students can draw a diagram of the water cycle and turn it into a key for their different colored loops.
- Before doing the activities, teachers can use the included vocabulary lists for word work, writing, word walls, or other vocabulary acquisition activities.
- Teachers may want to pair these activities with lessons on each of the topics, such as Exploring the Water Cycle, Detecting Schoolyard Food Chains, and Climate vs. Weather.
From the scientist review
This resource presents a series of labs that investigate the extreme environment of the Great Salt Lake. Each lab is well-organized, and all terms are clearly defined. The resource goes to great lengths to describe the perilous ecological balance in the lake before introducing climate change as its greatest threat. This resource is recommended for teaching.
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