My Hero, Jane Goodall

One of my science teachers asked if I would be willing to put together a lesson about Jane Goodall for Women's History Month. Boy, would I!!
Jane Goodall is one of my all-time favorite people in the world. I admire that she pursued her dreams despite the many obstacles in her way.
For the lesson, we started with listing all of the female scientists we could think of, read the picture book Me Jane, and watched a short video introduction of Dr. Goodall, then we read an article about her life on Newsela. I asked students to highlight important details from the article then summarize by creating a tweet style summary on Google Slides.

We discussed her important discoveries then did a few activities to go with it. I asked students to stand on either side of a line and, without using words, communicate to the other group that this is your territory and they should not cross the line. After a few giggles, we then watched a video of chimp territorial behavior.
Then we used plastic cups and straws with hole-punched holes to simulate using tools to gather and eat termites. Rub the straw on your hair and give it a try. After trying it, we watched a video clip of chimps using tools.

For our final activity, we did chimp vocal "charades". Students used a common vocalization chart to mimic a call after pulling from a list including pant bark, pant grunt, pant hoot, wimper, scream, food grunt, waa, and hoo. Students tried the vocalization and the rest of the class tried to guess the vocalization. After a few brave souls tried it for themselves, we watched a short video clip of a researcher discussing their communication system.
You can find all of the video clips I used here.

One of my life-long dreams came true a few days ago, when I was able to see Dr. Goodall speak in person. She came to an event at Auburn University in Alabama. Since she is 84 and it was only a four hour drive, I gladly paid the ticket price to see her. She hooted her greeting, shared how her mother encouraged her, told the earthworm and egg story (if you've read her bio, you know what I mean), shared the books that changed her like Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan of the Apes, gave her voracious reading credit for being able to impress Dr. Leakey when they met, and shared her hopes for the future of our planet. It was an amazing experience.