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Animal Themes
Endangered Animals Theme Unit
Mammals

Giant Pandas

Giant Pandas
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 3 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   6.58

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    digestive, extremely, farewell, linings, meat-eating, nourishment, panda, species, undigested, giant, thus, nutrient, bamboo, birth, certainly, powerful
     content words:    Western China

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Other Languages
     Spanish: Los Pandas Gigantes

Giant Pandas   
1     An endangered species, the giant panda can only be found in the mountain bamboo forests of Western China. There are only about 1,000 wild giant pandas left in the world. Giant pandas are members of the bear family, and they are mammals. They wear a creamy white fur coat with black bands across their shoulders and black patches over their legs, ears, and eyes. Even though giant pandas look just like bears, they certainly do not behave like bears. Unlike their meat-eating relatives, giant pandas are vegetarians for the most part. Their favorite food is bamboo. However, if they are extremely hungry and bamboo is nowhere to be found, giant pandas may eat grass, fruits, or sometimes, small animals like chicken.
 
2     Giant pandas have powerful jaws and jaw muscles that can crush bamboo shoots, stems, and leaves between their large, flat teeth. They also have tough linings in their throats to protect against sharp bamboo splinters. However, the giant panda's digestive system is not good at absorbing fibers, the main nutrient in bamboo. Much of the bamboo passes through giant pandas' bodies undigested. Thus, giant pandas must eat a lot of bamboo every day to get enough nourishment. In fact, they spend at least 12 hours every day eating about 33 pounds of bamboo.
 
3     Giant pandas do not live in groups. They are loners! They only leave their territory from March to May to look for a mate. Female giant pandas usually give birth to twins. Baby giant pandas are very small, blind, pinkish, and weigh about 5 ounces at birth. Strangely, mother giant pandas tend to choose to raise just one baby and leave the other to die. Mother giant pandas feed their babies with milk. A baby giant panda opens its eyes at six to seven weeks. It starts to learn how to walk when it is about three or four months old. Mother giant pandas look after their babies for about 18 months. Once the young is strong enough, it bids farewell to its mother and moves out to live independently.
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