The Deserts
The word
Make Your Own Rain Shower
Rainforests are hot and steamy. Steamy air rises and hits the cooler air above, causing rain. You can make your own tropical rain shower. You need two pie pans, ice cubes, an oven mitt, cold water, an electric (plug in) teapot, and help from a grownup.
Plug in the kettle full of water. Place an empty pie pan on the countertop in front of its spout.
Add cold water and ice cubes to the other pie pan.
When the teapot boils put on your oven mitt to protect your hand and hold the pie pan full of ice water up over the steam rising out of the teapot spout.
The water vapor will begin to collect on the bottom of the ice-chilled pie pan. It will cool and condense. Soon water droplets will begin to drip down into the bottom pie pan.
You have just created a rain shower!
Less than half of the paper products we use are recovered for recycling. We can do better than that! See if you can find all the paper products hiding in the grid. Highlight each one with a bright marker. Next time you go to throw this item out at your house, save it for recycling instead! Words can be up and down, side to side, or backwards.
To live in a desert, plants and animals have to adapt to survive. Many animals are nocturnal and only become active at night when the air is cooler. Some animals go into a type of hibernation and sleep through times of drought or extreme heat. This is called estivation. Some animals like the fennec fox develop large ears to cool off their bodies. The way this works is that the blood circulating through the ears is very close to the surface and is cooled by chilly nighttime desert temperatures. Some other desert animals can survive without drinking any water at all, but get all the moisture they need from the dry plants they eat.
Many of the animals on the endangered species list live in the desert. Some include:
Arabian oryx
Bactrian camel
Desert bandicoot
Desert monitor
Desert tortoise
Fresno kangaroo rat
San Esteban Island chuckwalla
Sonoran pronghorn
The hot, central Australian desert has red sand plains, mountains, and bluffs spotted with dry lake beds that shimmer in the sun with the false promise of water showing in superheated mirages. Amazingly, many animals like kangaroos have adapted to the dry landscape and can survive from the little moisture they get in the plants they eat.
Keep a Cactus for a Houseplant!
Cacti are easy houseplants to keep because you rarely have to water them. There are many cool kinds of cactus. It's fun to start a collection on your windowsill. Just make sure you buy your cacti from a good plant store that only buys from certified nurseries and not from people who poach cactus from the desert.
A Dry Spell
Some deserts can wait a long time for rain. The Atacama Desert in South America is the driest desert on Earth. It once waited four centuries with no recorded rainfall.
Make Their Environment
Find pictures of animals in old magazines and trace them (or cut them out and paste them) onto the center of a large sheet of paper. Now draw their environment around them. For example, if you have traced an African elephant, add the grassy savannah. Add a baobab tree and a bright blue sky. Add a herd of zebras and a giraffe. This is an elephant environment.
The Sonoran Desert has large, sandy plains and bleak mountains. It stretches over parts of southern California, Arizona, and northwestern Mexico. Branches of the Colorado River run through it, so many trees, cacti, and shrubs find enough water to grow there. In Arizona, the giant saguaro and barrel cactuses can be seen all over the desert. Beautiful flowering cacti and yucca make the desert seem more like a garden than the open sandy place one might imagine. When deserts do get rain, plants bloom and seed quickly to take advantage of the short-lived water supply. Heavy rains can cause flash floods and a dry riverbed can be a gushing river in just a few minutes. The desert is a habitat of extremes!
Cold DesertsThe largest desert on Earth is actually not a hot desert at all but a freezing ice shelf — the interior of Antarctica. Though covered with ice, it rarely snows here. Most of the snow falls on the coasts. This frozen desert, oddly enough, keeps much of the earth's fresh water locked in a thick sheet of ice more than a mile thick. Another cold desert is the barren, rocky plain between southern Mongolia and northern China called the Gobi desert.
The world's deserts are growing. A dry grassland is just a few inches of rain away from becoming a desert. When overgrazed by livestock, the plants, whose roots have stabilized the soil and held in the moisture, are lost. The topsoil dries up and is blown or washed away. The land becomes a desert.
