Information for Teachers

If you are interested in creating a program based on the Oriole Project, please contact your local sanctuary for more information. An education coordinator can help you design a program that best meets your curricular needs.

You may also wish to design your own program. Download our Fact Sheet for Teachers: All About Orioles (PDF 160 KB).

Learning Standards supported by the Mass Audubon Oriole Project
Depending on how your students get involved, the Oriole Project could support the following Life Science Learning Standards:

Grades PreK - 2

Characteristics of Living Things

• Recognize that animals are living things that grow, reproduce, and need food, air, and water.
• Recognize that plants and animals have life cycles, and life cycles vary for different living things.

• Describe ways in which many plants and animals closely resemble their parents in observed appearance.

• Identify the way in which an organism's habitat provides for its basic needs.

Grades 3 - 5

Characteristics of Plants and Animals

• Classify plants and animals according to the physical characteristics that they share. Plant/Animal Structures and Functions
• Recognize that plants and animals have life cycles that include birth, growth, development, reproduction, and death.

• Give examples of how inherited characteristics may change over time as adaptations to changes in the environment that enable organisms to survive.
• Give examples of how changes in the environment have caused some plants and animals to die or move to a new location (migration).
• Describe how organisms meet some of their needs in an environment by using behaviors in response to information received from the environment. Recognize that some behaviors are instinctive and others are learned.

Grades 6 - 8

Evolution and Biodiversity

• Relate the extinction of species to a mismatch of adaptations and the environment.

• Give examples of ways in which organisms interact and have different functions within an ecosystem that enables that ecosystem to survive.
• Explain the roles and relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in the process of energy transfer in a food web.

• Identify ways in which ecosystems have changed throughout geologic time in response to physical conditions, interactions among organisms, and the actions of humans.