Survival of the Fittest

 ….. or at least  survival for the red squirrels in our science game! As teachers, we are always looking for ways to bring real-world concepts into our classrooms. We did this by playing a survival board game.

We have been learning about animal adaptations, predators, and environmental changes in our science unit.  We played a game where we have 10 squirrels that live in environment 1. We move around the game board collecting food and water cards. When we have one food and one water card, we are able to bring another red squirrel into the environment.  If we landed on an owl, we needed to eliminate a squirrel.

Game 2- More Owls

We played the same game, but this time the environment game board had more owls on the grid.

We recorded how many squirrels were left in each environment after going around each gameboard 5 times.

Conclusion:

We gained a deeper understanding of how the number of predators greatly affects the number of red squirrels. Game one, the red squirrels were living their best lives–game two, squirrels needed to be on the look out for predators!