Student Pages
Teacher Pages
Additional Resources
Key Vocabulary: The Forest of S.T. Shrew
What’s the Connection?
Forest Characters
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Tools
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Enrich
Option 1: Take students on a hike through the woods, a park, or a vacant lot, so they can have a closer look at some of the habitats Jackie saw on her adventures—a dead log, tree bark, leaf litter, and so on. Distribute magnifiers for students to take a closer look. Can the students find any of the same (or similar) creatures that Jackie saw? Can they find anything else?
Option 2: Challenge students to make up a math question or puzzle using characters from the story. You may have them choose how to present their equations, using pictures or words. For example:
- Millie has two dozen body segments, with two pairs of legs on each. How many legs does she have in total?
- Sitta found 15 caterpillars on a tree. After she eats a third of them, how many are left?
- If it takes 1 black beetle one month to eat a piece of dead lizard, how long will it take 4 beetles to eat the same amount?
Option 3: Have students write the story of Jackie’s next adventure in which she shrinks in size again and explores a different habitat. Discuss different habitats with students, have each student pick one, and research its plant and animal life. Then, imagine a way for Jackie to shrink and meet new animal friends who will guide her. Have students present their research using digital presentation software such as PowerPoint or Glogster.
Option 4: Have students make a model of a forest habitat using a shoe box or other small box. You might allow students to select a habitat of their choice to research and model. Students may use plastic animals and plants, or pictures of animals and plants drawn and cut out of paper to depict the habitat elements. Make sure habitat models include the four things habitats provide: food, water, shelter, and space.
Option 5: Read aloud Redwoods by Jason Chin, described in the Additional Resources. Draw a large redwood tree on poster paper, and have each student write on the redwood trunk one specific adventure that the young boy had on his journey.
Option 6: Have students read or listen to one of the following books in the Additional Resources. Direct students to identify the main ideas of the text, and discuss or write about how it is connected to the theme of ecosystems. If possible, you might also invite a photographer to the class to share photos of insects or other wild animals in your area. Suggested titles include:
- Animals Up Close by Igor Siwanowicz
- Micro Monsters: Extreme Encounters with Invisible Armies by Nam Nguyen
- Nat Geo Wild Animal Atlas: Earth’s Astonishing Animals and Where They Live
- The Beetle Book by Steve Jenkins
See Additional Resources for more ideas to enrich this activity.
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Evaluate
Option 1: Assess students’ understanding of key terms used in this activity with the Key Vocabulary: The Forest of S.T. Shrew student page. Refer to the Key Vocabulary: The Forest of S.T. Shrew teacher page for the correct responses.
Option 2: Use student drawings or flip-up pictures from the activity to assess their understanding of the main ideas presented in the story.
Option 3: Give each student a copy of the What’s the Connection? student page to complete. Use The Forest of S.T. Shrew Evaluation Rubric teacher page to assess student responses. Possible answers include:
Living things:
ant, bird, beetle, carrion beetle, caterpillar, centipede, earthworm, fly, fungi, grasshopper, grub, lichen, millipede, moss, nuthatch, orange fungus, pill bug, termite, salamander, shrew, spider, squirrel, wasp, white grub, wood roach
Non-living things:
air, dead animals, dead leaves, dirt, ground, log, soil
Ways living and non-living things are connected in the story:
- Earthworms, beetles, and other decomposers live in the ground.
- The decomposers eat the soil and decaying plant and animal matter.
- Carrion beetles eat animals that have died.
- Moss and fungi live on dead logs and snags.
- Wood roaches, termites, pill bugs, beetles, salamanders, and other organisms live inside logs, chewing and tunneling through the wood, helping to break down the log and turning it into soil.
- Nuthatches and other birds fly in the air.
- Nuthatches eat the insects found on the bark of trees.
Option 4: Using the A Forest Adventure with S.T. Shrew student page or one of the suggested texts listed in Additional Resources, have students perform a cloze reading assignment, using their knowledge and subject comprehension to fill in the blanks. Cloze reading is a test of comprehension that involves having students use their knowledge to supply words that have been systematically deleted from a text. You may delete specific content words for students to complete, such as:
“In here, it’s like a tiny ________,” Millie told her. “We have tons of workers who are busy, ________and night, breaking this log down into soil. All the nutrients in the wood are getting ________!” Everywhere they went there were things ________, tunneling, and burrowing through the wood. There were wood roaches, small white termites, and hard-shelled pillbugs that rolled into tight little ________for protection as she and Millie went by. There were also insect-eating ________: huge, shiny, black beetles with giant jaws, and centipedes with venomous ________. When they’d crawled deep inside the log, they saw a salamander resting in a dark damp hole.
Possible answers include (in the order they appear in the sample cloze passage): factory, day, recycled, chewing, balls, hunters, fangs.
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Doing the Activity
Engage
- Divide the class into pairs or small groups and give each a set of the Forest Characters teacher page. Challenge students to identify what the six animals depicted on the cards have in common. (They might notice that they all live in forests and that they all depend on forests for food.)
- Ask students what a forest is. How is a forest different from a single tree? Invite them to write down three questions they have about forests, and save these to revisit later at the end of the activity.
Explore
- Tell students you are going to read them a story about a girl named Jackie who has a forest adventure. They should listen carefully to the things that happen to Jackie and pay special attention to the things she sees. Later, students will answer questions about the story.
Cast of the Forest of S.T. Shrew play
Photo credit: Terri Pollock
- Read aloud the A Forest Adventure with S.T. Shrew student page. Depending on the age group you’re working with, you may want to read the story in different ways. For example:
-
- Consider breaking the story into three chapters: In the Ground, A Rotten Place to Live, and Life at the Top.
- Assign students roles in a theatrical rendition of the story. Use the S.T. Skit student page to have students narrate the characters independently or act out the scenes as a play.
- Assign the students to read the chapters as an independent, silent reading task.
- Have the students relax, close their eyes, and listen as you read the story from start to finish.
Explain
- Pass out drawing paper and crayons or markers, and have the students draw pictures of the story. They might draw a picture of their favorite part of the story, the most interesting creature Jackie met, or a scene that depicts Jackie and many of the creatures in the forest. They may also create flip-up pictures of the forest (as in the photo) by first drawing a forest habitat with animals living in and around the trees, then covering up the animals with sticky notes to make flip-up windows.
- Encourage students to describe their drawings and to construct an explanation of what they depicted. For the flip-up pictures, they might also explain why each spot is appropriate for that particular animal.
Elaborate
Students display their forest flip-up projects.
Photo credit: Kelly Huey
- Divide students into groups of two to three, and assign each group part of the story to rewrite on sentence strips. Collect the strips and ask for volunteers to help place them in the proper order. After completing this activity as a group, the sentence strips can be placed in a literacy center where students can use them later to create their own stories.
- Ask students to revisit their three forest questions from Step 1. What answers were they able to uncover as a result of participating in this lesson? Ask volunteers to share one of their questions and answers.
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Background
What’s an Ecosystem?
An ecosystem is a community of plants, animals, and other living things that live in the same area or environment. In an ecosystem, living things interact with each other and with the environment in which they live.
Think of a puddle you might see behind your schoolyard. You may find all sorts of living things in the water, such as tiny insect larvae and algae. If the pool is large enough, you might find frog eggs or tadpoles. In order to live there, these organisms depend on each other for food energy and nutrients. They also depend on non-living things like water, sunlight, the water temperature, and nutrients in the water. This very complex interaction of living things and their environment sustains life in the ecosystem.
What’s a Habitat?
A habitat is the place within an ecosystem where an organism lives, and where it gets all the things it needs to survive. It contains all the food, water, shelter, and space that the organism requires.
Habitats can be different sizes, depending on the animal or plant. A black beetle’s habitat might be a single log, where it gets everything it needs to live. A humpback whale requires much more space, and its habitat might stretch from Alaska to Hawaii.
Plants and animals are often adapted for specific habitats. For example, certain kinds of plants are suited to growing in forest clearings, which are lighter and drier than other areas of the forest. Mosses may be able to grow on one side of a tree or rock, but not on the other, because the light and temperature are different. And some animals that live in damp leaf litter couldn’t survive on bare soil.
Introducing the Story Characters
Students will read the story of a girl named Jackie who learns about forest ecosystems and habitat from three main characters:
S.T. – the short-tailed shrew
© Grant Heilman Photography / Alamy
A shrew is a small—but fierce—mammal about the size of a mouse and weighing as much as a nickle. It has a long nose and sharp pointy teeth, and it can attack and kill prey several times its size! Shrews mostly eat insects like beetles, grasshoppers, or wasps, but they can also eat small birds, small snakes, and even other shrews.
Shrews live in lots of different habitats throughout the world, but mostly in and under soil and leaf litter in moist areas. In the eastern United States, one of the most common woodland mammals is the short-tailed shrew, which has a stubby tail.
Young shrews are born in a hollow stump, log, or burrow, and can fend for themselves within a month. Their life span is short—they live at most just three years.
For more information about shrews, see “Shrews” on the BioKids (University of Michigan) website.
Millie – the millipede
©Shutterstock: Matthew Cole
A millipede is a long, slow-moving animal that typically has 40 or more pairs of legs. Its hard body is made of lots of rings or segments.
The name “millipede” comes from the Latin words mille (“thousand”) and pes (“foot”). Despite the name, no one has ever found a millipede with 1,000 legs! Most species have between 40 and 400 legs.
Millipedes eat decaying leaves and other dead plant matter. They usually tunnel in soil and are often found under bark, stones, or old boards, or in damp garbage.
For more information about millipedes, see “Millipedes, Centipedes, and Relatives” on the BioKids (University of Michigan) website.
Sitta – the nuthatch
©Shutterstock: Tom Reichner
A nuthatch is a large-headed, short-tailed, short-legged, tree-climbing bird. Some nuthatch species sport a black “cap” on their heads. Nuthatches eat insects hidden in the bark of tree trunks and limbs. They also like large seeds and nuts.
Nuthatches are very active and quite agile: you can often see them climbing both up and down tree trunks, head first! In the winter, nuthatches flock with other forest birds like chickadees and titmice. Their wings extend nearly to the tips of their tails.
For more information about nuthatches, see “White-breasted Nuthatches” on the All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) website.
Discussion Questions
- What is an ecosystem?
- Which of the plants and animals mentioned in the story have you ever seen?
- Choose a shrew, millipede, or nuthatch and describe how it gets food energy from the ecosystem.
The Forest of S.T. Shrew — Overview
Students take a “shrew’s-eye-view” of life in the woods to gain an understanding of the variety of organisms that live in forests and to learn how living and nonliving things interact.
Learner Objectives
- Identify the main points of a short story about forest organisms.
- Name at least five organisms that may be found in a forest ecosystem.
- Describe the interactions of living and nonliving things in a forest.
- Identify ways that organisms living in a forest ecosystem get the food energy they need to live.
Materials
- Copies of A Forest Adventure with S.T. Shrew student page or S.T. Skit student page
- Copies of Forest Characters teacher page
- Drawing paper
- Sentence strips
- Crayons or markers
- Sticky notes (optional)
Time Considerations
- Getting Ready: 15 minutes
- Doing the Activity: one to two 50-minute periods
- Evaluate: 20 minutes
Getting Ready
- Make copies of student and teacher pages.
- Cut apart the Forest Characters cards, making sets for each pair or small group.
- Gather other materials.
- Decide what material from the Background page to share with students. For example, you might present some of the information in the Explain part of Doing the Activity, or use the suggested Discussion Questions to support a casual conversation on the topic.
- See Additional Resources to find other supports for teaching this activity.
Key Vocabulary
You may use the Key Vocabulary: Forest of S.T. Shrew student page to introduce students to the following vocabulary terms or to review or assess their mastery of these terms. Note that the definitions below are geared for students, while the definitions that “pop up” within the activity text online are geared for the teacher.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Adapted | Suited to certain conditions in the environment. |
| Ecosystem | A community of living things interacting with their environment. |
| Environment | Everything around an organism that affects it. |
| Field | An open area of land where there are no trees or buildings. |
| Forest | A large area of land densely covered with trees. |
| Fungi |
An organism that gets nutrients by absorbing materials from it
s surroundings. Fungi are important decomposers.
|
| Habitat |
An area that provides an organism with enough food, water, shelter, and space to live.
|
| Leaf Litter | Leaves and other dead plant matter that have fallen to the ground. |
| Mammal | A warm-blooded animal that has fur or hair and produces milk for its young. |
| Microhabitat | A small habitat where very small organisms live. |
| Nutrient | A substance needed for health and growth. |
| Organism | Any living thing. |
| Species |
A group of organisms that share the same characteristics and can
have offspring.
|
PLT Conceptual Framework
- 1.1. Living components of the environment interact in predictable ways with nonliving components, such as air, water, and geologic features.
- 2.1 Organisms are interdependent and depend on nonliving components of the Earth.
Standards
See Standards Connections in the Appendices for a list of standards addressed in this activity.