Exploring The Desert

This start grid serves as the launcher for the "Exploring the Desert" unit, and it is is opened when a student double-clicks this unit's title from Clicker Explorer. Each small graphic on the launcher is a link to the book it illustrates. The anchor book, Deserts, is listed first, followed by the other two content books. Hiking the Desert Adventure lets students explore at their own pace, while Meerkats focuses on one interesting animal from the Kalahari desert of southern Africa.

Below the three content books are a comprehension gridset for the anchor book and for Meerkats, and a journal relating to the adventure book. Desert Review is a combination comprehension/writing exercise. A sorting exercise rounds out the unit. Students can return to the Clicker Explorer list by clicking on the Home button, in the lower right part of the grid (house within a circle).

You can click on any of the book covers in the launcher graphic above to jump to screenshots from that book and a brief description of it. You can also access that information by scrolling down this page. After each description, you can click a link to return here and try another title. This unit is included in both Ecosystems Collection B and the full Wonders and Magic of Nature collection.

The anchor book for the unit, Deserts, explains that there are hot deserts and cold deserts, but all of them are very dry. A pop-up grid opens to display a map showing where deserts are located around the Earth.

The student then has the opportunity to read about the main characteristics of all deserts, how plants and animals have adapted to these environments, and how deserts differ around the world.

This book follows the anchor book, and provides students an opportunity to show their comprehension of the subject through a series of multiple choice questions.

Each set of three questions is preceded by a photograph originally seen in the anchor book, to jog the students' memories and make this exercise more than a simple drill. This photo from the Great Basin desert in North America precedes a set of questions about the differences between deserts in various locations.

The Hiking the Desert Adventure book gives the student a chance to explore by making choices as to which path he or she wants to take through the desert. Students click one of the two large buttons to go to the next point of interest. Hovering the cursor over these buttons brings up a label describing that destination.

Photos and videos add a realistic atmosphere to the experience as students encounter a roadrunner, a jackrabbit, a gila monster, and other desert life. There are eight different paths available in the book and students are asked to take notes as they travel so that they can later document their adventure.

When students complete the Hiking the Desert Adventure, they next create a finished journal about their explorations. A pop-up grid with photos from the adventure enables students to insert one photo on each page of the journal.

They then write about what they saw in the desert, using the photos to organize their observations. The finished journal is saved and also can be printed.

After their visit to the meerkats, students can show what they have learned by answering the questions in this book. Photos from the Meerkats book precede question pages, with three multiple choice questions per page.

In this screenshot, the answers pop-up for the second question on the page is open, displaying the four answer choices for this question. Students click on the answer they believe is correct to insert it into the cell just below the question.

Desert Review gives students a chance to write about topics from all three content books from the study unit. Photos jog their memories and then on the following page they are asked a specific question.

They write the question and answer into Clicker Writer, aided by words ready to insert from the grid and by wordbanks, including one with the specific vocabulary for this unit.

The final lesson in the unit asks students to sort animals that they have seen in this unit from those they have encountered in another unit. In "Exploring the Desert", the student sorts pictures of desert animals and animals from the savanna unit.

Students choose items from a pop-up grid and insert them into two cells, representing Desert and Savanna. When they have finished sorting the animal pictures, the gridset is saved into their portfolios where it is available for review.