Lesson Plans

Lesson Plans: (http://www.dec.ny.gov/education/36572.html)

Dining Out With Fishes and Birds of the Hudson

Two worksheets explore, with the use of many photographs, the variety of birds’ beaks and of fishes’ mouths and how they are adapted to eat various foods. A third worksheet explores food chains and food webs and asks students to construct a Hudson River food web using information from the first two worksheets. A basic food chain lesson – What Do Animals Need to Stay Alive? FOOD! (PDF) 531 KB – is available for younger students.

Fish Communities in the Hudson

Students will use tables of fish collection data to draw conclusions about where fish live in the Hudson estuary. A basic lesson on habitats – What Do Animals Need to Stay Alive? HABITAT! (PDF) 555 KB – is available for younger students.

Which Fish Where?

This lesson is similar to “Fish Communities in the Hudson,” but intended for older students. The tables present more data, and students explore the relationship between salinity and fish distribution in greater detail.

Finding the Salt Front

Students will use Hudson River salinity data to create a line graph that shows the location of the salt front, and use math skills to explore how this location varies over time.

The Hudson’s Ups and Downs

Students will interpret line graphs of Hudson River water levels to learn about tides and tidal cycles in the estuary.

Mapping Where Animals Live

Using actual maps from the New York State Amphibian and Reptile Atlas, this lesson asks students to use map-reading skills and knowledge of geography to determine where various species of reptiles and amphibians live.

These Maps Are For The Birds

Similar to “Mapping Where Animals Live,” but intended for older students, this lesson shows how biological data can be presented in geographical format using actual New York State Breeding Bird Atlas maps. With data sets collected twenty years apart, students will also explore how and why bird distributions have changed over time.

Science Lesson Package

Teacher and student sections for all of the lessons above in one pdf file, paginated to allow back to back copying.

 

Civic Scientist Environmental Monitoring of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary

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