Science.5.12.C

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The student is expected to describe a healthy ecosystem and how human activities can be beneficial or harmful to an ecosystem.
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Knowledge and Skills Statement

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

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  

regular sequences that can be found throughout nature

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

Research

Rockow, Michael. “Tabizi Pythons & Clendro Hawks: Using Imaginary Animals to Achieve Real Knowledge About Ecosystems.” Science Scope 30, no. 5 (January 2007):16–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43181037.

Summary: In this activity, the teacher creates his own fictional animals and plants to teach students about ecosystems and food webs. Real food webs can, at times, be too simple or too complicated for some students. This made-up food web allows students to examine food webs without any prior knowledge of the animals and plants they are observing. This also allows the teacher to create animals that help teach specific concepts. Cards are printed with these animals on them along with cards listing different scenarios that might affect an ecosystem (droughts, floods, human activity). Students will separate these cards into groups based on whether they are herbivores, carnivores, or producers and create a food web of their own.