Vocabulary words taken from the story such as hatchling, litter, beach, rubbish and patiently can be used in a variety of activities. Have students work together to come up with a definition using context clues from the story first. Then have them look up the words in a dictionary and see if they were correct. For reinforcement have students write sentences using their vocabulary words or draw pictures to accompany each word.
Using the information from the story as background knowledge, lead the students in a discussion on the life cycle of sea turtles. Brainstorm questions they have about the turtle's life cycle and if possible allow them to search the internet for more information and answers to their questions. Using the graphic organizer from the Teachnology website, have students use what they learned to illustrate the life cycle of the sea turtle in the correct order. Help them label each picture with an appropriate caption.
Math activities that involve creating graphs help students visually recognize relationships between data. Introduce the lesson by explaining to students that a bar graph has two axes, x and y. Draw the horizontal axis on the chalkboard and label the x axis "Year". Make eight marks, evenly spaced on the x axis, labeling the marks 2003 through 2010. Label the y axis "Number of Nests." Make eight marks, evenly spaced on the y axis, and label them, counting by 100's with the numbers 100 through 800. Have the students make the same graph on graph paper using a pencil and a ruler. Provide your students with information on the number of loggerhead hatchlings for the each year. You can find this information on the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation website, or you can give random numbers for the sake of the activity. As a class, plot the information on the graph, creating a bar to show how many nests loggerhead turtles laid each year.
Have students write their own story about sea turtles by providing them with some sentence starters they may choose to use. Some sentence starters include:
Loggerhead turtles begin their lives on...
Sea turtles eat...
The sea turtle's biggest enemy is...
Loggerhead turtles like to...
Challenged advanced students by providing them with words to use in their story instead of sentence starters. Choose words like: flippers, eggs, seagulls, nest, beach, whale, shark and ocean.