Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: How cool are koalas?

15 minutes

Find Out: What makes a habitat?

30 minutes

Take Action: Let’s explore!

5 minutes

Reflection: How can we help koalas?

Tune In: How cool are koalas?

Step 1

Ask your students: What Australian animals do you know? Create two lists on the board, one for native Australian animals and another for introduced animals (they originally come from overseas).

You may want to keep three lists, one for native, one for introduced and one for ‘we don’t know!’. You can explore theses ones as a learning extension activity.

Step 2

Wow, that’s a lot of animals! Let’s take a look at one of the most famous Australian animals, the koalas.

Show your students this video:

KOALAS FOREVER 🐨🐨 | WWF-Australia - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1L6hyGiooY)

Find Out: What makes a habitat?

Step 1

Ask your students: What do koalas need in their home to survive?

Take note of the student’s ideas without making a judgement on whether they are correct or not. Their ideas might come under some general headings, including:

food
water
shelter
companionship.

Step 2

Talk through this visual explainer with your students to learn what koalas need. Remember to link the ideas back to their earlier suggestions.

Food: koalas need trees, but primarily, they need eucalyptus or gum trees. There are around 800 different species of gum trees. Koalas can eat around 50 types of these, but some koalas prefer just 2 or 3 species from their home habitat. Just like we have our favourite foods, so do koalas!
Shelter: koalas need a safe place to sleep, eat, and have their babies. Gum trees again! Koalas have strong arms and long claws to help them climb the tall gum trees. In fact, koalas are excellent climbers - it’s one of the things they do best! As long as they are high in the trees, they are safe. When they need to come down to the ground, it’s not very safe for them. If there are enough trees, koalas can jump from tree to tree without coming down to the ground. When it is hot, they can cuddle the trees, and the trunks cool their tummies down. When it is cold or wet, they can curl up into a tight ball under the leaves and keep warm. Just one gum tree isn’t enough for them. They need to have a good range of trees that they can move between depending on the weather.
Water: Trees again! Koalas get most of their water from eating the gum leaves. They will sometimes eat a little bit of other trees, like wattle trees, to get extra water, and when they are REALLY thirsty, they can drink water too.
Companionship: Koalas don’t really have koala friends. When you see two koalas together, it is usually a mum and her joey. Mums look after their joey for about 1 year before their babies go off on their own. But they do communicate with each other, especially the male koalas.

When we talk about an animal's home and all the water, plants and animals in this home, we call it a ‘Habitat’.

Literacy extension: Create a class definition for the word habitat. Ask your students to think about different habitats around the world. They can choose one habitat to draw a picture of and write what kind of habitat it is, e.g. Jungle habitat, desert habitat etc.

Step 3

Everywhere that plants and animals can live is a habitat, even our school. Let’s have a think, What animals have we seen around our school? Keep a list of your students' suggestions.

What about the plants within a habitat? What plants have you seen around our school? Again keep a separate list of their suggestions.

Take Action: Let’s explore!

Step 1

Now we are going to head outside and look closely at our school’s habitats and see what plants and animals we can find. Divide your students into groups of three.

One student will be the recorder and in charge of the clipboard and pencil.
One student will be the manager and in charge of the equipment.
One student will be the director and in charge of making sure they go to the right places and keeping the group on track.
If you need groups of 4, one student can be the researcher and in charge of looking and identifying plants and animals.

Each group will need:

a clipboard, worksheet and pencil
a hula-hoop
‘looking closely’ tools (magnifying glasses, cardboard tube telescopes, small mirrors etc).

Safety considerations:

Make sure your students are sun-safe (hat, sunscreen etc.).
Set the boundaries for your students. You might like to use ‘invisible fences’ i.e. There is an invisible fence between that tree and that building and we cannot cross it.
Set behavioural expectations (when I blow the whistle, everyone returns to me).
Remind students that these animals and plants are in their home. We don’t touch or disturb animals, and we don’t break or damage the plants.
Discuss any animals in your environment that could cause harm (e.g bull ants, snakes) and what the students should do if they encounter them.
Make sure students with animal-related allergies (e.g. jumping jack bites) are aware to avoid where they might encounter that animal and that medication is available.

Step 2

Let’s head outside! Our first stop will be a big open area where we can see around the school environment. Ask your students, what different habitats or places can you see here? Where are areas where the plants or the land change and make a new space? Your students might suggest:

the oval or other grassy areas
tanbark or wood chips around play equipment
big trees
footpaths
garden beds
mulched areas
logs or other timber on the ground.

Step 3

Start with a grassy area. Ask the students to put their hula-hoop on the ground. What plants can they see inside? Is it all grass, or are there some other plants like clover or dandelions? Is it all the same type of grass or are there different ones? Next, let’s get out our ‘looking closely’ tools. Can we find anything else in our hula-hoops? Are there small plants we didn’t notice before? Are there any bugs crawling around? Sometimes, while we can’t actually see animals, we might see signs that they have been here. What sort of tracks and traces do animals leave behind? Your students might suggest:

feathers or fur
footprints
homes, like bird nests or ant hills
or even scat (that’s a scientific word for an animal’s poo).

We might also hear animals, even when we can’t see them. Let’s start recording our findings on our worksheet. Students can draw or write what is inside their hula-hoop and the individual plants or animals.

Learning support: We have also included animal bingo on the other side of the worksheet. Students can check off the animals as they find them and add additional animals either by writing or drawing into the boxes below.

Step 4

Next, repeat around the schoolyard in different habitats such as tanbark, mulch, garden beds, etc. Put the hula-hoop down, have your first look, and then get out your ‘looking closely’ tools and have another look.

Sometimes we can turn rocks or sticks over carefully to see what is underneath, but remember, this is the animals' home, and we don’t want to hurt or disturb them.

Step 5

Once we have finished our exploration, let’s head back inside and revisit our lists. Can we add more plants or more animals to the list? If students don’t know the name of a plant or animal, we can write a description or draw a picture to represent it.

Your local plant nursery is a great place to discover the names of plants you don’t know. You can then find out what animals these plants provide habitat for.

Are there more plants and animals than we expected? When we are talking about the different amounts of plants and animals in an area we call this ‘biodiversity’. The more types of plants and animals we have, the more ‘biodiversity’ we have. Let’s look back at our hula-hoops. Which one had the least amount of plants and animals? (probably the grass, or a concrete slab or footpath) This one had the least biodiversity. Which one of our hula-hoops had the most biodiversity?

Literacy extension: Explore books on different habitats, biomes, or environments. Students might think that places like Antarctica or deserts have low biodiversity, and exploring books such as these can help them identify the range of plants and animals that live in these places!

Reflection: How can we help koalas?

Let’s come back to our koalas. Did we see any today? Does our school have good habitat for koalas? Let’s go back to our list of what koalas need:

lots of big and small gum trees
a big area to move around
other koalas
a source of water
a healthy habitat.

Does our school provide koalas with habitat?

Watch this video with your students:

Endangered Koalas - Behind the News - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WDdxvWR8K8)

So we know that koalas need food, water and shelter from their habitat, and to have a beautiful and healthy habitat, they need a lot of strong, happy gum trees. What can we do to make sure there are lots of strong and happy gum trees?

Your students might suggest planting lots of gum trees. Excellent, let’s head to the beach and plant gum trees! That’s a great idea, right? No? The question we need to ask is ‘Does the habitat of the beach meet the gum tree’s needs?’ Let’s think about the soil. We already decided that a sandy beach wouldn’t be a good place for a gum tree. What makes healthy soil for trees? Students might suggest worms, or fertiliser, or compost or even animal poo!

So it turns out that koalas need trees, and trees need other animals, who also need other plants…it just keeps going! This is why biodiversity is important. If we have lots of plants and animals, it means the habitat is healthy, and all of our animals and plants, including our koalas, will be happy and healthy.

What are some things we can do to help protect our koalas?

Your students might like to Wear It Wild! This is WWF-Australia’s NEW annual Earth Hour fundraising event, held each year to help schools celebrate, support and learn about the environment. Students and teachers across Australia are encouraged to Wear it Wild by wearing wildlife-inspired fancy dress to school in exchange for a gold coin donation to raise funds to protect Australia’s precious landscapes and unique wildlife, like koalas.

Could Koalas Live Here?

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Learning intentions:

Students will...

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Curriculum Mapping

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UN Sustainable Development Goals

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