The North American Bear Center’s Educational Outreach team encourages teachers to proactively plan and adapt the delivery of the following lessons to match students’ readiness levels, interests, and preferred mode of learning. By answering the key questions on the Curriculum Map, students will deepen their learning about black bears and experience an enduring understanding.
Because teachers are often constrained by time, the need to teach other disciplines, and the need to meet mandated education standards, the following lessons offer a cross-curricular, integrated approach to teaching about black bears. We are aware of and celebrate the diversity of students, and hope to provide opportunities in our lessons for students with varied learning styles and multiple intelligences by diversifying instruction with writing, art, dramatization, songs, games, hands-on activities, and cooperative learning techniques.
Lessons are adaptable to a variety of grade levels. If you are teaching older students and feel they need more foundational information, adapt lessons designed for younger students to your classroom. The process of how the material in a lesson is learned may be differentiated for students based on their learning styles, taking into account what standards of performance are required for a particular age level. Teachers are encouraged to adapt what they want the students to learn or how the students will gain access to the knowledge, understanding and skills presented. Students could have a choice to work in pairs, groups or individually, but all students would be working towards the same content standards and objectives.