Higher:
To explain why gestation periods may differ
Middle:
To understand that different animals have varied lengths of gestation
Lower:
To know what a gestation period is
Higher:
To be able to draw a graph to represent the varied lengths of gestation in animals
Middle:
To calculate the length of gestation period for various animals and work out the difference between these
Lower:
To research different gestation periods in animals
Lesson Recap Starter: Think back to the last lesson. Describe the life cycle for the animal of your choice.
Lesson Starter - Guess or predict how long each of these animals is pregnant for. You can record your answers in your book or on a mini whiteboard.
Children are to guess or predict how long each of the animals on the slide is pregnant for. Ask children to justify their answers.
Answers are given on the next slide.
Presentation - Starter Slide
Mini Whiteboards (optional)
Answer questions and take part in activities during the presentation.
Stop the presentation at the relevant slides: Talk Partners; AfLs; Songs.
Take part in the Choral Response Questions activity (see Assessment section) after the Keywords/Rocket Words slide.
Key Concept:
During this unit, each lesson contains a key concept question housed in the '30 Second Challenge' slide. To help children master this content so the knowledge moves from their short term memory to their long term memory, at the beginning of the follow on lesson the question from the previous lesson is revisited.
The questions covered during this unit include:
1. Describe the life cycle for the animal of your choice.
2. Can you think of any reasons why some animals have longer gestation periods than others?
3. What is propagation?
4. What changes have you gone through from birth?
5. What does adolescence mean?
6. Discuss what you can do to make more time to care for elderly members of your family or community.
Presentation
Expert Film: Zoologist Mike Linley explains about gestation periods of different mammals.
Ask the children if they have any pets that have had babies - how long was mummy pet pregnant before she had her babies?
How we deliver the Gatsby Benchmarks:
2 - Learning from career and labour market information: Pop along to Developing Experts career’s zone to find out about jobs in your area.
4 - Linking curriculum learning to careers: This unit showcases careers that relate to life cycles. Access our 360° virtual work tours.
7 - Encounters with Further and Higher Education: Pop along to Developing Experts career’s zone to find out about training providers in your area.
Presentation - Expert Film
Gestation Periods
Children to research five different animals and their gestation periods. They could find out how long average gestation is in days.
Look at Mission Log for guidance on charting the data.
Mission to Write
Children to use page two of the handout to explain their results and justify why the longest and smallest gestation periods are as they are.
Gestation Periods
Books / Internet for research
Handout
Pencil
Ruler
Coloured Pencils
Children to use the Handout to create a bar graph / chart which presents the different gestation periods.
Quiz
With their talk partners, the children are to go through the quiz at the end of the presentation and answer the questions.
Handout
Quiz in presentation
What is a gestation period?
What factors can affect the length of gestation periods?
How could you record gestation periods?
Why might it be useful to know the gestation periods of different animals?
Is there a link between gestation periods and endangered animals?
Award marks for accuracy of scientific enquiry and graph drawing.
What is a gestation period?
What factors affect the length of gestation periods?
Whole class choral response/phrase suggestions
A gestation period is...
The length of a gestation period can be affected by...
Human beings experience a 40-week or 9 month gestation period as standard. However, there are wide variations on this length of time across the animal kingdom. The exact gestation period isn't always easy to calculate, especially in species like monkeys or men when the time of conception is unknown. It has been suggested that the further a primate is along the evolutionary scale, the longer the gestation period. For example, a mouse lemur has a gestation period of around 60 days, a gorilla 255 days and a human 267 days (on average).
So, what else affects gestation periods? Firstly, the size of the animal - smaller animals will generally have shorter gestation periods (not always) Also, some animals will adjust so that they only breed during the period where food is most abundant, such as sheep and horses. Some animals even have delays in development during the gestation period, which prolongs the overall wait for the birth. For example, some weasels and badgers. For some of these animals, their gestation is 250 days, but growth only happens for 50 of those days.
Mission Assignment: This task requires children to understand how to conduct secondary research in order to find out the gestation periods of animals. Children then need to understand how to translate this information into graph form.
Explore Gestation Periods
Reporting and presenting findings from enquiries, including conclusions, causal relationships and explanations of and degree of trust in results, in oral and written forms such as displays and other presentations
