Who is Lily? (part 2)

Do you know who Lily is?

You can read the blog post on my WonderFamilyEdwards blog to find out more about how I found out who Lily is (I guess that would be part 1).

By the way, Lily is a bear that my daughter's Kindergarten class at Caleb's Creek Elementary has been watching on a web cam ...

I think the idea of viewing various animals web cams is interesting, so I asked her teacher if she would mind sharing some of the things they are doing with this in class.

Here is her response:

Well...the bears...it all began just because it was cool!  I was hooked two years ago when Lily had her first cub.  Then last year, Lily had two cubs.  One of last years cubs is denning with Lily this winter...but it seems that they have been having difficulty with Lily's camera. So...we discovered Honey and Lucky as well as Jewel.

 

We often pull up all the den cams and leave them up as we work.  Then we can see (& hear) them..and stop to watch and discuss what we see.  We have read books about bears (fiction and non-fiction) and discussed why bears hibernate.  We have researched (online and in books) different kinds of bears and compared them. We have compared bears to humans (food, water, needs, habits, living things).  We have discussed how bears move, hunt, etc.  We have compared the different bears we watch (bigger/smaller, activity levels, etc.).  We are getting ready to learn about other animals that hibernate...so we can compare them!  We have looked on the globe to see where these bears live...as well as other bears we read about.  We occasionally watch Freja (in Sweden)...not nearly as good!  We talked about camouflage...and why polar bears don't live in the woods and black/brown bears don't live in the arctic!  When we discuss our daily weather...we check the top of the bear.org webpage to see what the weather is in Ely,MN.  The discussion was interesting when we saw -12 the other morning!!!!  We use a large thermometer to show the temps.  We go on a bear hunt for fun and/or exercise.  Yesterday, we had the kids "design" a cave by tearing paper...and then draw a bear and cut it out to glue in the cave.  We imagined we were bears...and wrote about what we would dream about ...this will go with the cave.  I am sure we have done other things...but nothing else comes to mind right now. 

 

Look at all the multidisciplinary things this teacher is addressing with her class based on what they are watching on the animal webcam. Love it! And this is just a Kindergarten class! Think about all the reading and writing activities that could be done with students at older grade levels.

Holly Dubois shared some other related links with me too:

Another link you can look at (more in the spring) that I sometimes show the kids is this one of an eagle nest in VA. http://www.norfolkbotanicalgarden.org/e-community/eagle-cam  I love the bear one too but have not looked at it yet this year. This also has fun winter wildlife pics. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/photos/winter-wildlife/  (takes a while to load!)

I also want to point out KB...Konnected's LiveBinder full of Amazing Animal Webcams.

I should also mention Steven W. Anderson's previous post: A Window to the World with Webcams.