Feet and beaks

Instructions

Use the cards to complete the chart to show how each bird's feet and beak help it to get its food. HINT: think about the food and where the bird gets it.

Name of bird	Beak	Feet	Type of food

Use these pictures to look carefully at each bird.

Cards about beaks
long beak for probing nostrils at the end of beak for smelling food	long beak for spearing prey	pointy beak for pearing prey
strong beak for opening cones to get seeds, digging for grubs in rotten wood brush tongue for getting nectar from flowers	"whiskers" above beak for sensing flying insects	scoop shaped beak for scooping up food in water flexible beak for digging under stones
Cards about feet
long toes for holding food and hanging from branches	perching feet for sitting on tree branches	perching feet for sitting up high and watching for prey
large webbed feet for swimming	strong legs for walking on forest floor	spread out feet for walking in soft sand long legs for wading in water
Cards about food
nectar, seeds, and fruit of native trees, grubs in rotten wood, honeydew on beech trees	freshwater insects and freshwater snail in fast-flowing rivers	flying insects in bush areas
fish, small mammals and birds, insects	fish, frogs, tadpoles, insects and spiders	worms and insects found in the soil and leaf litter

Teaching and learning:

Purpose of assessment
When thinking about how you are going to use this task, consider what sort of information you want to obtain.

If the purpose is to find out where next teaching points for the class should be focused, use as a group or pairs task, leading to a class discussion of the contentious ideas, with groups attempting to justify their opinions.
If the purpose is self-assessment (either as a group or individually), used part way through a unit of work, provide the answers once the card-sorting activity is complete, and ask questions that help students to evaluate their thinking. Go to Next Steps.
If the purpose of the task is to assess students' learning at the end of a unit of work, use the cards individually, or the pen and paper version (Feet and beaks II). Focus attention on whether they understand the big idea about adaptations to survive in a particular environment rather than on specific details.

NOTE: This task has a high literacy load so may not be suitable for some students if the purpose is to assess individual students' understanding. Consider what support students may need to ensure that the task is a reliable measure of what they know.

See Further resources for alternatives that involve less reading and writing.

Diagnostic and formative information:

The students worked in pairs. One of the 4 pairs completed the whole task correctly. One pair completed the task correctly except for muddling the food of the kingfisher and heron (which are very similar)
One pair mixed the kingfisher's feet with the fantail's. This same pair confused the kingfisher's and fantail's food too. (This was possibly a careless error as a result of rushing at the end).
One pair had considerable trouble with the food column although they got the beak and feet columns correct. This pair had kaka eating flying insects and fantail eating nectar, seeds, grubs etc. They also muddled the food of the heron and kingfisher. It would appear that this pair was able to complete the bits of the task that required direct observation but had more difficulty with making inferences.
During the activity it was clear that several groups used the labels on the pictures to help them find the right cards.

Working as a group, debating their answers, and manipulating the cards provided areas for students to identify their own learning needs as well as providing formative assessment information for teachers.
Working as a group was also supportive of students who were less able readers.

Similar patterns occurred in the pen and paper task, although results suggest that it was more difficult than the group task. Two reasons are:

Support provided by the co-operative nature of the group task; and
manipulating cards requires students to hold less information in their heads.

Next steps:

It is difficult to make inferences about birds' feet and beaks if you don't have sufficient background knowledge to draw on. For example, you need to know parrots eat seeds and generally have curved beaks before you can infer how a kaka might use its beak. Use information from the students' responses to identify where gaps in their knowledge are. They can then research this information.
Provide pictures of other birds with similar adaptations and ask students to predict what they might eat, and/or where they might live.
Keep coming back to the idea that all of a bird's features work together to enable it to survive. It is helpful to look at the "big picture", not only of the total bird but also where it lives and what it eats. Encourage students to include more than one piece of evidence when they are justifying predictions.
Explore very specific adaptations that a bird may have. For example:

Feature	Question
the position of a kiwi's nostrils at the tip of its beak, and its highly developed sense of smell	What other sense might not be so highly developed?
the "fan" tail of the fantail	What have you noticed about the way a fantail flies? How does the shape of its tail help it change direction quickly? Why does a fantail need to do this?
the brush tongue of the kaka	Why is it helpful to have both a brush tongue and a strong beak?

Picture source: J.L Kendrick, DOC	Picture source: C.R Veitch, DOC	Picture source: DOC
Picture source: George Pope, NZCER	Picture source: Wikipedia.org	Picture source: R Morris, DOC

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Feet and beaks

Feet and beaks