Chapter 7 Life on Land

Fig 7.1 Drawings of mythical beasts by children aged 5-11

Drawings: Anushka and Jeevan Sharp and children from Gorilla Class, Sandgate Primary School, Folkestone, Kent, UK.

Featured websites

Website 7.1 Planet Earth a celebration
A gentle celebration of the extraordinary variety of wildlife on our planet narrated by David Attenborough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kizCCIhtUs

Website 7.2 Animal mimicry
A one-minute video clip showing different examples of animal mimicry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1aEvHRlTxE

Website 7.3 Inside an ant colony
A cartoon explaining how ants succeed in co-ordinating their behavior without any central control.
https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_inside_the_ant_colony/transcript?language=en#t-92751

Website 7.4 The ants go marching
A fun cartoon version of this well-known song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjw2A3QU8Qg

Picture books

Oi, Get Off Our Train by John Burningham (Red Fox 1991). 
One by one, endangered animals try to board a young child’s toy train. 

One Day on our Blue Planet in the Savannah by Ella Bailey (Flying Eye Books 2015). 
The animals of the African grasslands are introduced in this attractive publication.

The Last Wild by Piers Torday (Quercus, 2013). 
Kester lives in an Academy for challenging children and has been told all the animals in the outside world have died of disease but is this true?

Other resources

The lost words
Four selections from the acclaimed book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris celebrating different plants and creatures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsYApE0qCg

The northern forest 
Find out about the plan to create a forest of 50 million trees across the full width of northern England. 
https://thenorthernforest.org.uk/

Endangered koalas
Following the devastating bush fires in Australia in 2020 the World Economic forum asks if koalas should be declared an endangered species.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/australia-wildfires-koalas-pushed-towards-extinction/

Deforestation
In this video WWF argues that leaders must make brave decisions to save the world’s tropical forests.
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/forests_practice/deforestation_causes2/