ingridscience

This activity models how different bird beaks can pick up different foods, or how different animals' mouths are adapted for picking up different kinds of food.

Version 1: outdoor relay race activity (see first photo)
Divide students into groups of three or four.
Give them a plate for food and a box of tools like bird beaks: clothes peg, 2 skewers that can be used for stabbing or like chopsticks, a pipette.
Place another tub "their nest" where their babies are waiting for food, across a playground. (This tub can optionally have a nest picture on it.)
The groups will receive food to pick up with any tool (no hands!) and run to the nest using the tool, relay-style, with only one person running to the nest at a time. When a group finishes one food, they will get another type.

Version 2: indoor activity, includes sieving
Tell students that they will model how a birds/animals eat, using tools. They cannot use their own tools, their hands, but only the tool to pick up pretend foods.

Show each tool in turn, and optionally bird or animal photos with beaks or mouths like these tools:
Clothespin models a 'grabbing' beak/mouth, like a robin grabbing a worm, or a bear grabbing a salmon.
Skewer models a 'stabbing' beak/mouth, like a heron stabbing a fish.
Pipette models a 'sucking' beak/mouth, like a humming bird sucking nectar.
Sieve models a 'sieveing' beak/mouth, like a duck sieving water for food.

Show students the four pretend 'foods' that they will try and pick up with their tools:
pasta or dried chickpeas in a tub (modelling an insect, worm or bug)
water in a tub (modelling liquid nectar)
popcorn kernals in a tub water (modelling little bugs or shrimp in water)
styrofoam pieces buried in a tub of rice (modelling frogs in mud) - only pick up the food, not the mud!
Each tub needs a little tub beside it, for students to move the food into. (Adults will need to dump this back into the food tub continuously.)

Give each student one tool, so that there are about equal numbers of each of the four tools.
Ask them to try and pick up all of the foods, and determine which is the easiest to pick up with the beak/mouth tool that they have. (No hands!)
After a few minutes bring students back to the carpet, and rotate the tools to new students.
Repeat trying a tool, and rotating them on, until all students have tried all tools.
Before the last couple of rotations, students can be asked to predict which food will be easiest for them to pick up.
(Note that as the popcorn kernals soften in the water, stabbing them might be possible)

Gather for discussion.
For each beak/mouth in turn, ask students to point to which example food (in the corners of the carpet they are around) was easiest to pick up. Student results will differ especially as the pasta and popcorn soften as they get a little wet, and new tools might be able to pick them up. (Some students also likely to want to state the challenge they mastered, rather than the easiest food to pick up.)
Expected results:
1. The pipette or baster is only able to suck up water. Look at bird/animal photos that eat by sucking: hummingbirds suck nectar (they also eat a lot of insects) and animals such as mosquitos suck blood. (Note: for birds, it is actually the tongue of the bird that sucks up the liquid, as it extends from the beak during feeding.)
2. The skewer should be very effective at stabbing the styrofoam and pulling it out of the rice. Softened popcorn kernels/pasta can also be stabbed with the skewer. Revisit photos of animals that eat by stabbing: a heron uses its long beak to stab fish from water or muddy water; a venomous snake or spider stabs prey with its fangs and injects venom into it.
3. The sieve or slotted spoon is effective at retrieving the popcorn kernels from the water, and also with patience can sift the styrofoam out of the rice, as well as scooping the pasta/chickpeas out of their tub. This tool models bird beaks/animal mouths that sieve food out of water. Animals that eat by sieving: a mallard duck picks up plants or animals along with water, then the water drains through holes (called lamellae) in its beak. Baleen whales e.g. humpback or grey whales take a gulp of water and krill, then the water drains out through the baleen, leaving the tiny shrimp for the whale to eat (a lot of them!)
4. The clothes peg can pick up the pasta/chickpeas, and maybe also the popcorn and smaller styrofoam pieces that have broken off. Many birds and animals grab prey, berries or seeds from a plant or insects out of the air, or tug a worm out of the soil.

Birds also have beaks for crushing nuts. Use pliers to demonstrate. e.g. finch. Sea otters have strong back teeth for crushing shells.
Bird beaks also tear at flesh (eagle), chisel wood (wood pecker), and probe in mud for animals (shore birds such as curlews).
Another animal eating method: a frog uses a sticky tongue to catch insects.

For a Biomes lesson:
Sieving ('filter feeding') is only possible in water biomes. Which animals eat in this way? [duck and baleen whale]
On land, as well as in water, animals grab, suck and stab. What animals eat in these ways? [bears grab salmon while they leap upstream over a falls, hummingbirds suck nectar and mosquitos suck blood, a heron stabs fish]

See fish feeding methods for a related activity.

Describe an inclined plane: driving or walking up a hill. Stairs in a house. Pushing an object up a ramp. You move for longer, but with less effort than going straight up.

Two kinds of tools are inclined planes: a wedge and a screw.
A wedge is a tool with an inclined plan on it, or with a slope on it, so rather than pushing on something head on, you push on a slope, which is easier. Pointy things are wedges.
A screw is an inclined plane wrapped around a shaft.

Students visit the stations of materials, try out the wedges and screws, and decide which one is and why. (Note: some are both e.g. screw with a pointed tip)
Optional: give them worksheets to draw the materials and show where the inclined plane is for each (see attached).

Before the lesson if using sticky Q-tips:
Dip the cotton tips of the Q tips in rubber cement, then leave to dry (turning frequently to start if glue drips downwards).
Paint rubber cement on the wide popsicle stick.
Package in baggies 30 Q tips and one wide popsicle stick per group.

For either method:
Ask students to make a structure that is made up of triangles. The structure could be high or wide.
If part of a bridges lesson, ask students to make the start of a bridge, with Q-tips building up from the popsicle stick and curving up and over. The challenge is to build a structure that is self supporting, as real bridge structures are (they do not hang on themselves, but are solid at every stage).
Tell students, based on previous discussions, or when they need assistance, that triangles are strong shapes that will support themselves, and so the should include many triangles in their structure.

Show the students how a ring and pin game can be made from a ring of bone (e.g. slice of leg bone) and a rib.
Demonstrate playing the game, the goal to try and catch the ring on the pin.

Give students a selection of ring and pin games made from skewers, chopsticks and rings (or they can make their own).
The string needs to be light, so that its weight does not drag the ring about, making it harder to catch on the pin.

The smaller rings can be quite hard, so make sure to test out first.

This game, as well as being made from bones, is found world-wide, made from many different materials.

Ring and pin game from Niwasa Kendaaswin Teg, a not for profit charitable Indigenous organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxAOjJ9YZVM. Information on traditional materials used, and ideas for your own materials.

Show students how to set up their bar, spanning it between two desks, or chairs, and taping to stop it moving around.
Using a large binder clip, hang the pulley from the bar. Or they can attach their pulleys elsewhere in the classroom using the large binder clip. Show them how to thread the string through a pulley and add a cup to each end of it using the small binder clip, then add counters.

Ask them to experiment freely with the pulleys. Give them ideas if they need them, writing them on the board to get them started, and adding as students find new ways to use them.
The youngest students I would help them set up one string over one pulley, then ask them to move the cups up and down with counters. They can be challenged to raise a flag, given some paper to tape or clip to one of the strings.
Older students can be challenged to raise a cup of counters both fast and slowly, balance two cups either side of a pulley, drag an object over their desk using counters in a cup and a pulley, or make a zipline. A clever system can be set up by hanging weights below a pulley which sits on top of a line.

Discussion with what they discovered should include how pulleys change the direction of a force. Counters in a cup or pulling down on a string in one direction moves an object in the opposite, or another, direction.
Show images of simple fixed pulleys that change the direction of a force on a flagpole.

Discussion around how objects can be balanced in two cups either side of a pulley, or one cup can be moved up slowly, can lead to how an elevator works. An elevator is a heavy car which the people go it, with a counterbalance on the other side of the pulleys. Elevator with counterweight visible here. As both these items are heavy, and nearly balanced on each side of a pulley, it does not take much force from the motor to move the car up and down (while the counterbalance moves in the opposite direction).

Students may notice, or can be asked to compare how many counters are needed to lift an object when the string goes through the pulley, or simply loops over the bar. This demonstrates how pulleys reduce friction by turning when the string moves over them. Without a pulley, it takes more forces to pull the string.

Discuss stretchiness as a property of a materials, and tell students they will compare how stretchy different elastic bands are.
Demonstrate how to tape an elastic band over the top of a desk, with a loop hanging down. Hang the weight on the band, then measure from the top of the band to the bottom of the band.
Students should compare the stretchiness of different bands. Then they can try doubling up the bands and looping them together to measure their combined stretchiness.

At the molecular level, stretchy materials have molecules that are curled up and coiled. When the materials is stretched, they uncoil and straighten out, but when released return to their coiled form.