Year 1 Incursion 

Animals of Oz Incursion 

From Kristen, Year 1 teacher

We were so excited to meet Kara and her amazing animal friends this week via an Online zoom incursion. 

 Some animals we met were a Grey-headed Flying Fox, Hannah the Huntsman, Tawny Frogmouth who loves to eat mice, Kookie the Kookaburra, a Bearded Dragon, Freddie the Green Tree Frog and a scorpion. We learned about pollinators, predators and biodiversity and how these animals are linked in food webs. 

Thanks so much to Kara from Animals of Oz for teaching us and sharing her friends with us. At the end of the incursion we voted on our favourite vertebrate, it was the Bearded Dragon. 

Did you know humans are vertebrates too? Yup, you can feel it down the back of your neck, this is your spine! Our favourite invertebrate was the scorpion. Scorpions have pincers and have an amazing ability to camouflage, when Kara shone a blue light torch on him, he glowed! No one knows why they do this. We also met a centipede bigger than her hand that was too poisonous to get out of its enclosure. Centipedes have one leg per segment of their body, if they had two legs these would be called millipedes.

All animals are really, really important; they are all connected to one another. This is called biodiversity! 

We learned an important message. Please don’t use bug spray on spiders or insects.  Even bugs are in the food web, others animals eat them and this will make them sick too. Remember the spider you spray, might get eaten by the Bearded Dragon, Tawny Frogmouth, Frog, or a Kookaburra. Kara even showed us how to safely move an insect or bug into a glass jar to relocate it outside, so that we can help protect all living things. 

What a wonderful world of nature we live in!!