Tackling the tusk: Hands-on learning about narwhals

Grade 1-3 students in Brenda Keay’s class at Silverstar Elementary show off the narwhal tusks they built.

Here at Live It Earth, we’re suckers for just about anything related to Narwhals. So when we saw the narwhal project that BC SD 22 teacher Brenda Keay did with her class, we just had to share it.

While participating in our Narwhals program, Brenda found that the Grade 1 to 3 students in her class at Silverstar Elementary were having a hard time appreciating exactly how big a narwhal tusk might be. (Up to 3m long!) So she had them build their own model versions to scale!

Brenda was kind enough to share how the project worked, so you can do a similar activity with your class if you like. Here’s what she had to say:

“I just took a long sheet of paper off the big paper rolls we have at school. The students started in one corner and rolled the paper. This gave the 'tusk' a tapered shape, some strength and, most importantly, length! We just taped the roll when the students were happy with the tusk—some took a few tries to get it just right. We measured our tusks and it was great that they were different lengths, as the Narwhal tusk lengths in nature also vary a great deal. We then used markers to create the spiral look of the tusks.

Extensions from this activity could be measuring out the length of the Narwhal body, story writing activities (in the Story Challenge) (adventures of the Narwhal tusk), research comparing elephant tusks, etc.”

Thank you for sharing my idea! I am honoured! And thank you for the very inspiring and enriching learning experience through Live It Earth. I am excited and enjoying the experience as much as my students are!!”

If you do any cool activities like this with your students, we’d love to hear about them. Feel free to share them with us by email at info@liveit.earth, or follow us on Twitter and post them using the hashtag #liveitearth!