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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Organisms and environments. The student describes patterns, cycles, systems, and relationships within environments.

The energy that flows between organisms in a food chain is chemical potential energy, which is introduced in grade 6.

This student expectation lays the foundation for more complex cause-and-effect relationships within food webs in grade 5 and energy relationships in middle school.

interval of time during which a sequence of a recurring succession of events or phenomena is completed; a course or series of events or operations that recur regularly and usually lead back to the starting point

the biotic and abiotic resources provided to support specific populations in a community 

the circumstances, objects, or conditions that surround an organism including abiotic (climate and soil) and biotic (living organisms) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival

a sequence of organisms in an ecosystem that traces the flow of energy from the sun through each successive organism

regular sequences that can be found throughout nature

a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole

Research

"Keeley, Page. 2018. “Formative Assessment Probes: Uncovering Representations of the Water Cycle. Science and Children 55, no. 5 (January 2018): 18-19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44709896. 

Summary: There are several common misconceptions that students make about interdependency and food chains. Students may assume that only the next living thing in a food chain is affected if one organism dies off, not realizing how this would affect the entire food chain. This article explains that early childhood students should understand that all animals depend on plants, even animals that do not eat plants at all. Students need to realize that all animals depend on plants, as in their later grades, they will need to understand that plants are the primary source of energy for animals in food webs. When teaching food chains, teachers should repeatedly trace back to plants at the start of the food chain and ask students other questions about interdependency in an ecosystem.