Exploring The Taiga Forest (Northern Forests)

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 A and the full Wonders and Magic of Nature collection.

The anchor book for the unit, Taiga, describes the short cool summers and long snowy winters of this biome found in the northern portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. The student then has the opportunity to read about how the harsh conditions limit the variety of plant life but support many types of animals, large and small.

Photos, supplemental text, and videos are presented on pop-up grids so that students can control the flow of information. On this page, the button on the open popup grid plays a video of the elk in the photo.

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 of the taiga forest precedes a set of questions about the characteristics of these northern forests.

The Hummingbirds book describes obsrvations of a hummingbird nest over several weeks. To organize the several visits to the nest, the story is presented in a table of contents structure. Chapters include the discovery of the nest with eggs in it, watching the hummingbird feeding the chicks, observing the growing fledglings, and a final visit after the young hummingbirds have flown away.

Photos and amazing videos give students a rare chance to watch the behavior of these tiny birds up close. Question pages throughout the book engage students by asking that they record their thoughts about what they observe. They write into Clicker Writer, and save the composition as a Clicker Writer document.

Students demonstrate what they have learned from the Hummingbirds book by answering the questions in What Do You Know About Hunmmingbirds? Before each set of three multiple choice questions, students are presented with a photo from the Hummingbirds book and a short paragraph to jog their memories.

On the following questions page, they open a pop-up grid for each question to choose from four possible answer choices. Here the answers for the first question on the page are open. A student clicks on an answer to insert it into the space just beneath the question.

Students can show what they have learned on their hike in grizzly bear country by answering the questions in this book. Photos from Grizzly Bear Country precede question pages, with three multiple choice questions per page.

The photo pages of the book give students their assignment, and photos like this one of a grizzly bear remind them of their experiences.

When students return from Grizzly Bear Country, they create a finished journal about their explorations. A pop-up grid with photos from their adventure enables students to insert one photo on each page of the journal.

They then write about their observations of the bears, using the photos to organize their observations. The finished journal is saved and also can be printed.

The final lesson in the unit asks students to sort words from in this unit from those they have encountered in another unit. In "Exploring the Taiga", the student sorts taiga words and words from the oceans unit.

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