BZL Teacher Resources
Browse below for information, lessons, tips, and helpful resources as you plan your class's BIG Zoo Lesson experience.
The BIG Zoo Lesson
Teacher-Led Lessons
This multi-page document includes pictures, artifacts, and helpful information for teacher-led lessons about penguins. You can learn even more about penguins in this text-only doc.
This helpful handout includes information, diagrams, and photographs about antlers, horns and tusks. In this teacher-led lesson, zoo staff will select items from the biofacts collection which students can gently touch.
This table helps students take notes during the teacher-led lessons on bird beaks and bird feet. Click here for the answer key to this chart.
Zoo staff will select about eight different types of bird feet for students to explore in this teacher-led lesson. The information here includes photographs, information, and diagrams for background information.
Zoo staff will select about eight bird skulls from the biofact collection for students to explore in this teacher-led lesson. Use this for diagrams, photographs, and background information for teacher use.
These description may be used by adults as a reference guide while working with the students at the display tables. Not all of these species will necessarily be used for each class.
This information sheet prepares teachers to lead lessons about mammal skulls, identifying carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores based on teeth, eye placement, and the size of nasal passage. Zoo staff will provide artifacts for this lesson.
Get your students on their feet with these brain-on, movement-based activities.
This packet assists students in taking notes during the teacher-led lesson on animal skulls.
Notes for teaching about animal pelts (and coverings, like sea turtles and snakes). Lesson focuses on adaptations for camouflage and warmth.
Here is a guide for facilitating substantive reflection - including strategies for laying a foundation, learning deep content, substantive conversations, connections between the content and the world outside the classroom, and problem-solving.
The above is a list of the Reptile and Small Mammal Building.
In this engaging real-world activity by Becky Morningstar, students are tasked with writing a diagnostic for an animal who's visited their veterinary clinic based on the information they're given.
Here's a helpful guide for getting the most out of your BIG Lesson experience...starting today!