Bring your students on an icy exploration of the polar ecosystem! The Arctic and Antarctica may look frozen and empty at first glance, but they’re full of life perfectly adapted to the cold.
✨ Perfect for grades 3–8, here’s what you need to bring ecosystems to life:
- Iconic BBC Videos: Share the clips on this page to introduce the location, plants, animals, and climate of the polar regions. (Don't miss the narwhals and emperor penguins!) Brought to you by world-class BBC programs like Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and Seven Worlds, One Planet.
- Free Printable: Use the Polar Brochure Template to help students pull it all together in an ecosystem report with facts they’ve learned (and a little extra research).
It’s everything you need to make ecosystems easy to teach and truly memorable for your students.
In Narwhals — Unicorns of the North, narrator Sir David Attenborough describes how a group of narwhals heads into the bay to find food when it runs into another group of narwhals traveling in the other direction. After a stand-off, they all swim back into the bay. Then learn about the mystery of the narwhal’s tusk. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Frozen Planet, a series that shows a fragile world of beauty and hostility, where nature finds a way to survive and thrive in frigid conditions.
The polar regions are the harshest places on Earth, and somehow life thrives there anyway — polar bears in the Arctic, penguins across Antarctica's ice. It's a good ecosystem for showing students that "extreme" doesn't mean "empty."
After watching polar videos, have students dig deeper with their own research and build a brochure covering:
- Location of the ecosystem on a world map
- Adjectives that describe the ecosystem
- Three animals that live there
- Three plants that grow there
- The climate
- Why the ecosystem matters
- Their favorite fun facts
Students summarize in their own words, which means they're practicing a real skill: pulling information from multiple sources and deciding what's worth keeping.
Bring your students on an icy exploration of the polar ecosystem! The Arctic and Antarctica may look frozen and empty at first glance, but they’re full of life perfectly adapted to the cold.
✨ Perfect for grades 3–8, here’s what you need to bring ecosystems to life:
- Iconic BBC Videos: Share the clips on this page to introduce the location, plants, animals, and climate of the polar regions. (Don't miss the narwhals and emperor penguins!) Brought to you by world-class BBC programs like Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and Seven Worlds, One Planet.
- Free Printable: Use the Polar Brochure Template to help students pull it all together in an ecosystem report with facts they’ve learned (and a little extra research).
It’s everything you need to make ecosystems easy to teach and truly memorable for your students.
In Narwhals — Unicorns of the North, narrator Sir David Attenborough describes how a group of narwhals heads into the bay to find food when it runs into another group of narwhals traveling in the other direction. After a stand-off, they all swim back into the bay. Then learn about the mystery of the narwhal’s tusk. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Frozen Planet, a series that shows a fragile world of beauty and hostility, where nature finds a way to survive and thrive in frigid conditions.
The polar regions are the harshest places on Earth, and somehow life thrives there anyway — polar bears in the Arctic, penguins across Antarctica's ice. It's a good ecosystem for showing students that "extreme" doesn't mean "empty."
After watching polar videos, have students dig deeper with their own research and build a brochure covering:
- Location of the ecosystem on a world map
- Adjectives that describe the ecosystem
- Three animals that live there
- Three plants that grow there
- The climate
- Why the ecosystem matters
- Their favorite fun facts
Students summarize in their own words, which means they're practicing a real skill: pulling information from multiple sources and deciding what's worth keeping.