Exploring The Tundra

This start grid serves as the launcher for the "Exploring the Tundra" 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, Tundra, is listed first, followed by the other two content books. Polar Bears focuses on one of the largest animals found in this biome, while Trekking Across The Tundra is an adventure format book where students choose their own route.

Below the three content books are comprehension gridsets for the anchor book and for Polar Bears, and a journal relating to the adventure book. A word sort 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, Tundra, describes the cold and bleak environment of this biome. On this example page students can open a pop-up grid with a map showing where tundra is located, around the north polar regions of the Earth. The student then has the opportunity to read about the main characteristics of the tundra zone and how plants and animals have adapted to the short growing season and low temperatures of this harsh biome.

Here a pop-up grid displays a photo of a caribou, one of the larger herbivores found in the tundra. Pop-up grids are used throughout the unit to display more text, photos, and videos than will easily fit on a page, thus breaking the content into smaller chunks.

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, such as this one showing the tundra landscape, to jog the students' memories and make this exercise more than a simple drill.

Polar Bears gives students a close look at this magnificent animal which has adapted successfully to living in the coldest parts of the tundra zone. Photos and videos demonstrate the behavior of the polar bears as they raise their cubs and search for food.

This photo, courtesy of NOAA, shows a polar bear making its way across a field of ice floes. Notice the vocabulary button, which students can use to open a pop-up grid with words relating to tundra that may not be familiar to them. Clicking a word plays an audible definition.

After students have read Polar Bears, they can test their comprehension with this book. Like the Tundra comprehension book, photos from the associated Polar Bears book are used in What Do You Know About Polar Bears? to remind students of the subject matter before presenting each set of three questions.

This screen shot shows the cover of the book. Like all the books in the unit, there is a button in the upper left that opens a pop-up grid giving the assignment and instructions, and a rocket button in the upper right that returns students to the launcher.

Throughout the associated journal for this adventure, students are presented with a photo from the adventure followed by a writing page with a question about it. Students compose an essay about the photos in Clicker Writer. Their compositions are then saved separately as Clicker Writer documents.

Writing is scaffolded by a set of tundra-related words on the grid that are ready to insert, by access to the specific unit vocabulary wordbank on a pop-up grid, and by access to the student's regular wordbank.

The final lesson in the unit asks students to sort vocabulary words that they have learned in this unit from words they have encountered in another unit.

In "Exploring the Tundra", the student sorts tundra words and words from the desert unit. In this screen shot, the pop-up grid with all the words is open, and a student is preparing find and click words associated with the tundra biome to insert them into the appropriate cell.