OVERTHEFENCE PRESS

Animals Awake: While You Are Asleep

Lesson Notes and Activities

Animals Awake is about nocturnal Australian animals which children rarely see because of their nocturnal rhythms. The aim of Animals Awake and the lesson notes is to assist teachers to familiarise the children with these animals which are often living only a few metres away from them in the garden or the bush. The following activities are designed to help the children understand the way these animals live, eat, sleep and reproduce and to feel an affinity with them. Children are excellent at mime and learn by doing it - many of the activities are based on this.

Activity 1: Habitat
Set up a tree and other habitat for each of the animals, for example, a cave, burrow, grasses etc. Make or draw the various nocturnal animals and put them in the night-time habitat. Talk to the children about where the animals would be at night, where they would be in the daytime and what they would be doing differently in the day and the night.

Activity 2: Seeing in the Dark
Talk about the change from day to night - the sun going down and the light sources changing from sun to moon and stars. Think about how the animals find their way in the dark. Explore how their eyes and other methods of finding their way - including peripheral vision and echo-location - are different from human eyes.

Activity 3: Animal Sizes
Using the measurements in the back of Animals Awake, talk about the size of the different night-time creatures and assemble them in order of length and weight.

Activity 4: Ways of Getting About
The animals in this book move about in very different ways. Talk with the children about how the use of tails and four legs aid movement. Using the descriptions in the poems, ask the children to:
Glide like a sugar glider
Waddle like an echidna
Prowl like a quoll
Run like a Tasmanian devil (rocking horse movement)
Fly like a bat
Scamper and dart like an antechinus
Freeze like a stick like the tawny frogmouth
Spring like a brushtail
Lumber like a wombat.

Activity 5: Sleeping in the Daytime
Using the descriptions in Animals Awake, ask the children to:
Curl up in a burrow like an echidna
Roost like a boobook on a branch
Hang upside down like a bat
Be a wombat in a burrow
Be a Tasmanian devil in a cave
Freeze like a tawny frogmouth.

Activity 6: Finding Food
What do animals eat and how do they find/catch it? The animals in Animals Awake eat different things and have their own ways of finding food. Talk with the children about where our food comes from and how each animal finds its food.
Wombat - grazes on grasses
Echidna - forages for ants
Tawny frogmouth - catches insects in flight and dives on small reptiles
Antechinus - catches insects and small mammals
Sugar glider - eats sap, blossum and leaves
Brushtail - eats fruit and leaves
Quoll - catches small animals
Tasmanian devil - hunts small animals
Bat - catches insects in flight.

Activity 7: Masks
Each animal has very distinctive characteristics. Make a characteristic prop (mask or other aspect) for each animal that can be worn by a child. For example:
Echidna - an oval with paper spikes on it could be strapped to a child's back
Wombat - large paws with claws could attach to hands and feet
Bat - make membrane wings that attach to hands
Sugar glider - material membranes to be attached between hands and feet
Tasmanian devil - a face mask
Quoll - long spotted tail
Antechinus - mask
Boobook - mask with big eyes
Frogmouth - mask with large beak
Brushtail - tail.

Activity 8: Having Babies and Getting About
These animals have very different ways of having their babies and of managing them - marsupials (live births and pouch), monotremes (eggs and pouch), birds (eggs and nests). The animals also have different numbers of babies at a time. This could be used as a counting activity.
Echidna - lays one egg that hatches in the pouch. Baby sucks milk and is carried in pouch.
Sugar glider - two babies stay in pouch drinking milk for 10 weeks and then move into the nest.
Wombat - one baby lives in pouch and drinks milk.
Bat - has several live babies which cling to teats - no pouch.
Tasmanian devil - four babies in pouch drinking milk for 15 weeks.
Bandicoot - five babies in the pouch for eight weeks.
Brushtail - one baby in the pouch drinking milk for five months - then carried on mother's back.
Quoll - five babies in the pouch for 10 weeks.
Antechinus - 12 babies in the pouch for five weeks.
Tawny frogmouth - lays two eggs into a flimsy nest. Parents keep eggs warm and they hatch after three weeks. Then babies sit under parents' wings.
Boobook - three eggs in a hollow of a tree and hatch four weeks later.

Activity 9: Bringing It All Together
Ask the children to wear the masks and sit in a circle. Teacher reads the various rhymes - or the children might learn them and chant. The relevant children move into the middle of the circle and act out the words for each animal.