ingridscience

If casts or stamps are available, make animal prints, and optionally your own hand print.

Alternatively, print out a life size bear print. e.g from here: https://wildlifeillinois.org/discover-animal-signs/black-bear-tracks/

Measure how long the animal footprint and your handprint is, to compare their sizes.
Record the number the toes or fingers. Do they have the same number of fingers/toes as us?
Make other comparative observations.

Note:
Often the animal footprint is only the front part of their foot, as they walk on their toes. If so, infer how long the real foot might be.
What shows up on the bear print that does not show up on ours? Claws.

Hold the bottle of iced water, to feel how cold it is.
Then wrap the bottle in each cloth in turn, and feel whether the cloth can keep your hand warmer.
(Note that if your hands get very cold from the ice, it will be hard to tell what the cloth does, so encourage students to use each hand in turn to give them time to adjust between each test.)

Students should find that the thicker, more furry, cloths keeps their hand warmer.
The air trapped in the thicker fibres insulates from the cold (i.e. it prevents heat from moving away from your hand).

Animal fur and feathers trap air to keep animals warm, sometimes from extreme cold.
Local animals with thick fur include bears, otters.

Bears moult annually in the early summer.  They shed both their underfur and outer guard hairs, leaving only a short, sleek summer undercoat.  Their new coat is growing in as the old one is being shed, so that by fall they have their thick, luxurious coats once again.
www.americanbear.org

Before the lesson make bags of fat:
Put half a block of lard in a medium ziplock baggie, and flatten it out.
Zip closed, then zip inside a second baggie.
Make a second control set with no fat: two baggies, one inside the other.

Hold the fat bag on your hand, then place a bottle of iced water on top of it.
Do you feel cold? (No)
Then do the same with the control bag. Do you feel cold? (Yes)
The fat is insulating and will stop you from feeling cold.

(Traditional 'blubber glove' has the same baggies of fat but you can put your hand inside: https://stevespangler.com/experiments/blubber-gloves/
I found that with young students, iced water often spilled into a blubber glove when they pushed it into the iced water.)

When bears hibernate, and the temperature outside is really cold (way colder than this water). They have a layer of fat under their skin which insulates them from the cold (it stops the cold from leaving their bodies).
Feel your fat under your skin by pinching your skin. Your fat is less than a cm thick. Hibernating black bears have a fat layer about 4cm thick. Polar bears have a fat layer up to 11 cm thick.

Background information: heat moves through fat half as fast as through muscle or other kinds of water-based body tissue. But for animals keeping warm, passive heat conduction rates is probably less important than controlling the paths of blood flow through the body e.g. using counter-current systems. Fat tissue near the skin can survive for hours without any blood going through it.

Loop the pipcleaner under the scales at the bottom end of the pinecone, going around several turns, but leaving a stretch of pipecleaner, so it can be hung up. Spread lard on the pipcone under the scales with the popsicle stick. Sprinkle the seeds over the lard. Hang the feeders outside, near a window, so the feeding birds can be observed.
I have used plastic coated wire (thick electrical wire) strung from a window hook to a nearby tree (hung in a loop, so that it can be rotated to hang on each feeder), and between trees (with a long free end that can be used to lower and raise the line, and tie it off around a tree trunk).
Or students can take it home to hang.

Possible items to add near the feeders:
Bird identification guide. Add a tally to mark off how many of each kind of bird students spot. See the resource website for excellent bird images and bird calls.

Birds eat the seeds, which are part of a plant.

Snails are placed on the undersurface of an inverted glass bowl, and put in the middle of a table group.
Students can observe the snails moving, including the muscles rippling on the underside of the body.
Talk as a class about how they move, how they sense etc.
Students describe their observations and/or write a poem about the snail (shape poem can be written on a simple drawing of a snail).
Adults can hand the students a snail to touch - this will help inspire their writing.

Make sure snails are kept cool, and do not keep too long indoors.

Students go outside to collect materials for the snail habitat:
sand for the bottom of the habitat (to hold water)
soil (for hiding in)
leaves and grass (for hiding in and eating)
sticks (for climbing on)

Back in the classroom, each student adds their item to the terrarium while saying what the snail needs their item for.
Start by adding sand to the tank, and add water to it to make it moist. Then add soil, moistening it if necessary. Then add leaves, grass and twigs.

Watch the tank carefully, for what the snail eats and does not eat, then add more plant items that are eaten.
Make sure the tank does not get hot (keep away from heaters), and do not keep snails too long indoors.

Challenge: move your teacher on the board only by changing the friction
Students stand around the teacher sitting on a board in the middle of the carpet.
Can a student push the teacher on the board? No - too much friction between the board and the carpet.
Ask for ideas for making the friction less so that we can push the teacher. Try each idea at a time to see how they affect the friction.
Ideas that may come up:
Use a greater force to push her, a force strong enough to overpower the force of friction. Add number of students pushing.
Move the board to the less bumpy floor e.g. tile. Less friction there.
Use a rolling shape - wheels, rollers or marbles - add them under the board, to reduce friction. (Hold on! They dramatically reduce the friction)
Use a lubricant - add something slippery (ice, or oil, or bubble mix) - ice works well.