Free Biomes and habitats lesson plans with activities, worksheets and printables

Hello my Omschoolers! Teacher Omi here with another batch of free geography and science lesson plans, this time featuring biomes and habitats. These are biological ecosystems (habitats) of plant and animal life that grow up around the temporal zones created by geological and geographical land and water formations and the weather and climate conditions they create. It's all down to the water cycle, my dears! 

So to begin with, what in the world are biomes? A better question might be where in the world are they? And the answer is, everywhere! Each region of the world has a biome (flora and fauna) that has developed in response to the geographical and geological features of the land and its water sources. These have created weather patterns and climate conditions which have in turn surfaced that land and caused certain vegetation to grow or not grow. And that in turn has caused animal life to develop certain features. Even the people that originally inhabited a place had to adapt to their environment. 

Here are the OG biomes that came into being: forests (tropical, temperate, and boreal or taiga), grasslands (savannas and temperate grasslands), deserts, tundra, and freshwater and marine ecosystems.  Each requires certain amounts and kinds of precipitation to maintain it. And the creatures that live within these do so in remarkable symbiosis.  

Unfortunately, human development of (aka building on) land has changed it. Plant and animal life has been deprived, driven out and eradicated by plowing under, draining, drying up, tearing apart, deforesting, polluting, filling up, drilling into, concreting over homes and biomes and stripping of resources. We see in The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss a parable about the outcomes of environmental destruction. So where creatures live now and what vegetation grows there has radically changed in many areas. But that's content for another day. 

Here are free biomes lesson plans from Lesson Plans that Rock. I checked all the links included and they work great! And here's a printable biomes lapbook pattern and tutorial to create it. Here are free biomes coloring pages to print from Ask a Biologist. And you can still count on EdHelper for great preschool animal science lesson plans. I'm also delighted to see that Mr. Donn is still around with free geography lesson plans, activities and printables galore. Plus every other subject in the curriculum! Has it really been 15 years since I discovered this site??