Classroom Ideas: Kindergarten-Fourth Grade
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Home Away From Home
Tigers are among the worlds most powerful, beautiful, and agile creatures. They bestride the top of the food chain and are well equipped to defend themselves in nature. But like many large mammals, tigers seem destined for extinction if people dont learn better ways to coexist with them. Three of the eight tiger subspecies (the Caspian, Bali, and Javan) have already vanished forever. The remaining five subspecies (Bengal, South China, Indochinese, Sumatran, and Siberian) persist in dwindling patches of habitat. Illegal huntingpoachingof tigers and destruction of the forests in which they live threaten to erase tigers from the wild.
As wild tiger populations shrink, zoos become an increasingly critical reservoir for tiger survival. But how do zoos keep their precious tigers alive and well?
In this lesson, students will learn some of the threats to tigers in the wild and some of the challenges of keeping them in wildlife preserves and zoos. They will then sketch and explain their designs for sensible tiger enclosures in zoos.
Connections to the curriculum: geography, science
Connections to the National Geography Standards:
Standard 8: The characteristics and spatial distribution of ecosystems on Earths surface
Standard 14: How human actions modify the physical environment
Standard 18: How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future
Time: Two hours