Cougars unit

 Hi, Future Ticia 2026 and I’m updating this REALLY old post to make it a bit more useful for everyone. It was a great science lesson when we were studying our Land Animals Unit, or if you just want a smaller Zoo animals unit (this is where I ended up here from). We learned a lot trying out the different activities, and all sorts of things were tried in our attempts to learn. I now return you to past Ticia 2012. I will pop back in from time to time with additional comments.

 We’ve been studying big cats recently and for this particular post I’m going to concentrate on our cougars unit.

Cougars Unit videos

One of the things that has really brought the lessons home during this unit is seeing videos of the animal in real life.  Most of the ones I’ve used are of them actually out in the wild, so it gives an even better feel of their natural lives.

Hi, Future Ticia 2026, and I’m back already. The videos we used are just not really there. Also, now I can embed them rather than linking to the website where I found them and the website was linking to a YouTube video.

So, first let me share with you a video from a Zoo.

Next, because the hands-on cougar lesson is all about the prey of cougars, let’s watch this video about cougars’ prey.

After watching the videos and reading about them, we decided to try out the experiment in the back of the chapter.  I’m not going to share all of the information on how because it’s part of the textbook, but I want to share what we learned and some tips for if you use the book.

But first, let me share a few books you might grab from your library (this is just me checking to see what my library has, I haven’t read these yet).

We are using Apologia Land Animals of the Sixth Day, and I highly recommend getting either the Junior notebooking journal or notebooking journal.

• Cougars– this is from a solid publisher and I’ve liked other books in a similar series
• Meet a baby mountain lion– This is a great book series that focuses more on younger animals, which is always popular with kids
• Big Cats– This is not specific to cougars, but I like Gail Gibbons, so I added it in because it’s such a useful book

Cougars Unit Game

Okay, Future Ticia 2026 is going to give a quick overview, because it feels really weird not to give you any idea of what is about to happen. This is my memory from 12 years ago.

Tape out a 4-foot by 4-foot square. You have a whole slew of various different prey animals (mostly deer), and you put a few in the square. Then you drop a cougar in the square. If it lands on the deer, it has successfully hunted, and it lives to hunt another day. If it doesn’t, then the deer reproduces, it gets really hungry, and can try to hunt again. The next time if it doesn’t successfully hunt, then it will die.

What we learned from our cougar hunting game

1.  Do not try this experiment on tile.  The poor cougar slides off the deer, and it didn’t seem to matter how many deer there were; they starved.

2.  You really need to add weight to the back of your cougar either by putting tape on it or gluing it to cardstock or something.  We had a lot of tape added, and they still slid all over.

What did they learn from our cougar lesson?

1.  It didn’t matter how many deer there were if the cougar wasn’t a good hunter; then he was going to die of starvation.

2.  Deer reproduce fast.  At one point, Princess had 24 deer in her forest.

3.  It’s hard to have more than one cougar in an area, no matter how many deer there are.

 

So, despite the experiment not working right, they still learned a few things.

Have you ever had an experiment go wrong, but still learn from it?

Some more experiments

• How do dinosaurs digest their food? (gizzards)
• Insect Camouflage
• Ocean currents experiment
• Does a pumpkin float?
• How to separate a mixture