Home Sweet Home!

Background
The game is most effectively used in the context of a study of environments and adaptation. The activity aims to get children to look at a variety of different vertebrate animals and to think about ways in which they are adapted to their habitats. The focus is on looking at key features of the animal's physical appearance and using these as clues or evidence in order to predict in what type of environment each animal lives.

Teaching suggestions
The first activity, using the dolphin, is set up as a demonstration of the features which may give clues to habitat. This can be used for a whole class or group demonstration. Children are directed to consider aspects of colour, coat, limbs, overall body shape and facial features. It would be helpful to discuss these with the groups ensuring that everyone understands what they mean and how each feature may be adapted to a specific habitat. Issues for discussion could be camouflage, types of coat necessary to hold warmth or shed water, limb adaptations for swimming or flight, optimal body shape for streamlined progress, and the distribution of facial features such as eyes on the top of the head in animals living in muddy swamps.

After the general introduction children can work in pairs on the activity. There are a considerable number of animals available and you may wish to restrict each pair to say 6 or 10. A printable worksheet is available on the site for recording.

Although, for the sake of the game, only two key clues must be selected, nature is rarely as clear cut as this and some of the 'wrong' choices could be argued for. For example, the key features for the penguin (flippers and streamlined shape) lead to a choice of 'sea' as habitat. However, many children will know that penguins live in polar regions and may prefer 'ice and snow'. The game will mark this as wrong as it cannot accept two options. Make a feature of this by asking children to identify cases where they would wish to argue that either the key features or the habitat should be different from those rated as 'correct'.

Follow-up activities using the printable resources
A copy of the printable record sheet could be used with a selection of animals not included in the online game. Animal pictures could be used in conjunction with encyclopaedias (text or CD based) to make predictions about habitat on the basis of physical appearance and check the validity of these.

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