Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics

This instructionally-embedded assessment (performance assessment embedded into a set of lessons lasting 3-5 days) helps students make sense of the complex interactions in that occur in an ecosystem. For decades, scientists and engineers have been inv ...

  This game can be played by one or two players. Each player chooses an animal and then has to build a habitat with an ecosystem that will let them survive and thrive. Food Fight has a feature called SnapThought ™  that allows the ...

Students will be acting as agricultural engineers as they conduct a scientific experiment to test the effectiveness of a sustainable pest-control technique called soil biosolarization that uses organic waste (oatmeal, flour or cornstarch) r ...

This activity is a culmination of a 16 day unit of study where students explore the biosphere's environments and ecosystems. In this final activity, students apply what they learned about plants, animals, and decomposers to design and create ...

Students use an ecosystem simulator to test their hypotheses about producer/consumer and predator/prey relationships. The simulation includes grass, rabbits, hawks and foxes interacting together in one ecosystem. Students can ...

Students identify an owl pellet's contents and practice recording and analyzing the data.

This resource consists of five activities for students to explore food webs and food pyramids within the context of a wetlands ecosystem. The example ecosystem is based in Ohio but would work as an ecosystem introduction in any state. The lessons hig ...

In this lesson students participate in a classroom model of a food web. During the creation of the model, students discuss types or organisms, relationships between organisms in an ecosystem, energy, and matter. An extension activity at the end of th ...

The growth of food depends on the nutrients in the soil. Participants will gain hands-on experience in doing food tests. Literature books are used to arouse students’ understanding of food sources.

This modeling sequence allows students to explore how factors, both environmental and otherwise, can affect the relationships within an ecosystem through changes in population size.

From TeachEngineering - In this multi-day activity, students explore environments, ecosystems, energy flow and organism interactions by creating a scale model biodome, following the steps of the engineering design process. The Procedure section provi...

From TeachEngineering - Students explore the concept of biodegradability by building and observing model landfills to test the decomposition of samples of everyday garbage items. They collect and record experiment observations over five days, seeing ...

From TeachEngineering - Students learn about energy flow in food webs, including the roles of the sun, producers, consumers and decomposers in the energy cycle. They model a food web and create diagrams of food webs using their own drawings and/or im...

5-LS2-1, 5-LS1-1

5-LS2-1

LS2-1, LS1-1

Resource of who eats who in the Yellowstone Food Web.

Scientists and Engineers are Intuitive

Scientists and Engineers are Observant

Scientists and Engineers are Puzzlers

Scientists and Engineers are Creative

Scientists and Engineers are Fearless

Scientists and Engineers are Risk Takers

Scientists and Engineers are Inquisitive

Scientists and Engineers are Passionate

Scientists and Engineers are Persuasive

Describing Soil

We designed this resource for teachers who want to help their students learn about interdependent relationships in ecosystems. The content is aligned with disciplinary core idea LS2.A (Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems) at the 5th grade in...

This study formed the basis of an assignment for a teacher-training course. The objectives of the study were to define three scientific concepts and identify for each some of the misconceptions that students commonly have. Six students, representing ...