Animal Camouflage

Animal Camouflage

In Texas we teach animal adaptations to our 7th grade students. I normally begin the unit with reading passage worksheets from Super Teacher Worksheets that talk about camouflage, migration, and hibernation. The worksheets are on a 3-5 grade reading level and I use them to help remind them of concepts they should have learned in elementary school. Once we have a foundation we move on to our butterfly camouflage activity.

I provide the students with 2 blank butterflies. First the students are tasked with coloring a butterfly so that it can blend in with something in the classroom. The only rules are that the butterflies cannot be a single color and they cannot be hiding behind anything in the classroom. My room is covered in posters so they have a pretty easy time finding a spot that is more than one color. I have even had students put them on the ceiling tiles. Students are very creative. 

Once they have completed their butterfly I have them write a short description in their notebook of what their butterfly was camouflaged to in case their butterfly is lost or taken by another classmate. I tell them if it gets taken then it must not have been camouflaged well and a predator ate it so we learned that predators can find you if your camouflage is not good.

Once they have completed this portion of the assignment we watch a YouTube showing some amazing real life camouflage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJGtN-igCu8

After they have watched this video I then ask them to create a butterfly that is camouflaged to an actual environment. (I am sorry I did not take pictures of these) The students are asked to write a short description of what their butterfly camouflage is and what environment it would be able to live in. Then they glue their butterfly into their journal next to the description.

Finally they are asked to write a short paragraph explaining what would happen to their butterfly if their environment changed drastically. Then I normally show them the released STAAR question about the butterflies that adapted due to industrialization.

Once they are done we move to another type of adaptation. (See the blog post on CER)