Backwards Design Lesson Plan - Ecosystems Name: Elizabeth Flaherty Topic: Ecosystems Subject/Course: What is Alive?

Grade Level: 6-9 Desired Results

Established Goal(s)/Target(s)What will students know and be able to do - The students will be able to understand and define an ecosystem by describing and identifying the main components such as consumers, producers, predators, and decomposers. - Students will be able to describe relationships between consumers, producers, predators, and decomposers. - Students will be able to describe the relationships of populations of organisms with the biotic and abiotic elements of their environment. - Students will be able to describe the interrelationships among populations of organisms in an ecosystem. - Students will make hypotheses and test these hypotheses. - Students will present findings from their hypothesis tests by entering data into Excel and create graphs and figures. Standards covered: Systems, classification, order and organization Benchmarks: 8.1.6. Interrelationships of Populations and Ecosystems: Students illustrate populations of organisms and their interconnection within an ecosystem, identifying relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers. 8.2.1. Students research scientific information and present findings through appropriate means. 8.2.2. Students use inquiry to conduct scientific investigations Ask questions that lead to conducting an investigation. Collect, organize, and analyze and appropriately represent data. Draw conclusions based on evidence and make connections to applied scientific concepts. Clearly and accurately communicate the result of the investigation.

8.2.3. Students clearly and accurately communicate the result of their own work as well as information from other sources. 8.2.3. Students explore how scientific information is used to make decisions. The role of science in solving personal, local, and national problems. Interdisciplinary connection of the sciences and connections to other subject areas and careers in science or technical fields. Origins and conservation of natural resources, including Wyoming examples.

Assessment Evidence What is your evidence of Learning: - The students will complete assessment activities at the end of each lesson. In addition, the second activity is an assessment. - The final activity will allow students to use the information presented in the previous four lessons. This will also be the final assessment for this learning module.

Ecosystems Learning Module 1: Engage

What is alive in an ecosystem?

Objectives: The students will be introduced to the topic of ecosystems. Materials and Preparation: - Worksheet for Activity 1 - Lesson 1 Assessment worksheet Background Information: These terms are defined by Stiling (1999) as: Ecosystem is a biotic community and its abiotic environment. Producers: a green plant that converts light or chemical energy into organismal tissue. Consumers: organisms that obtain energy from the organic materials of other organisms both living and dead. Decomposers: consumers, especially microbial consumers, that change their organic food into mineral nutrients. Predators: organisms (predators) consume another organism (prey). Stiling. P. 1999. Ecology: theories and applications. Third Edition. Prentice Hall. Upper Sadle River, New Jersey. 638 pp. Trophic cascades: interactions between trophic levels (decomposer, producer, herbivore, predator) that result in inverse patterns in abundance or biomass across more than one trophic link in a food web.

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Students will create a list of all of the things they need to survive, the forces of nature that affect their everyday life, and the other organisms they might interact with. A worksheet will be provided that will direct this thought process. 10 minutes.
Activity 2: As a class, the students will now make a list of the elements of the Wyoming ecosystem. The list will be recorded on the chalk board. They should be encouraged to include the fungi, plants, animals (invertebrates, mammals including humans, herpetiles, birds), elements of the environment (climate), and anything else they may want to include. Activity 3: The definitions for producers, consumers, decomposers, and predators will now be introduced and the students will separate the listed elements of the Wyoming ecosystem into these groups. The concept of tropic cascades will also be introduced and discussed. Students have a worksheet to help illustrate this concept. The students will separate the

listed elements of the Wyoming ecosystem into these groups and create their own example of a potential trophic cascade in Wyoming. After making this organized list of Wyomings ecosystem components, students individually will write on a piece of paper the effects that could happen if a component was removed from the Wyoming ecosystem. Then students will be paired up to explain what would happen to a partner, or a number of partners. Activity 4: Assessment. Students will be given a short description of a portion of the South American rainforest ecosystem and instructed to determine the producers, consumers, predators, and decomposers. Then will also create an example of a trophic cascade using these information.

Ecosystems Learning Module 2: Explore

Objectives: The students will be visit stations placed throughout the room and answer questions to identify the organisms at each station as the various players in an ecosystem, as well as their (producers, consumers, predators, decomposers). The stations will include photographs and/or skulls of the organisms in a specific ecosystem; either Desert or Coniferous forest. Materials and Preparation: - Skulls showing teeth Available through loan from the University of Wyoming Graduate School. American black bear (Ursus americanus) Pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana) Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) - Photographs some photos available in a PowerPoint file attached. Other can easily be obtained from Animal Diversity Web http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/index.html - Station questions - Attached - Student answer sheets - Attached

Informal Assessment - Extension of Lesson 1

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Students will be free to move around the room to pre-established stations that will contain a skull or photograph. At each station, the students will be prompted to determine whether this organism is a producer, consumer, predator, or decomposer. They will also be asked to identify or propose another organism that the one at the station may interact with in the ecosystem and to describe that potential interaction.
Activity 2: Review of material. The teacher can ask the students to choose a few skulls and a few photos at the stations and ask students to discuss why they made their specific choices.

Note: There are more photographs/skulls than stations noted here. A teacher could easily put out more stations and ask students to simply answer the following questions: A) Is it a predator, herbivore, etc., B) Why do you think so? C) Describe another organism in the ecosystem this one would interact with and why.

Ecosystems Learning Module 3 and 4: Explain and Elaborate

Optional - Research on Group Ecosystems

Objectives: The students will be able to use the internet to gather information related to their ecosystem. Specific ecosystems have been chosen and will be assigned to student groups. The students will receive a brief description of their ecosystem including some of the major organisms that they should include in their research. During this information gathering, students will establish the decomposers, producers, consumers, and predators for their ecosystem. The students will then write testable hypotheses and try to predict what will happen if they change populations and what possible trends of change they might see. Finally, the students will create figures describing their results for the presentations. Materials and Preparation: - Hand-outs with background information with directions/ideas for the students literature research.

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Informational research on the students ecosystems. Students will be broken down into groups of two or three. All the available ecosystems can either be written on the board for students to choose, can be assigned, drawn from a hat, or the students can choose their own ecosystems,etc. Once the ecosystems have been chosen/assigned, students will receive the initial information and will have the opportunity to conduct their own information search on the internet or in the library. The information that the students need to collect should include population numbers, interactions with other species (What do they eat? Where do they live? Are they endangered?), and their general ecology. These questions are provided on a worksheet that will help direct the literature search.
Activity 2: Students will create hypotheses to make predictions about the outcome of a change in one or more of the organisms in their ecosystem. They may also create hypotheses about the outcome of a change in the abiotic characteristics of the ecosystem. Activity 3: Students will use information collected from the internet or library to attempt to either support or refute their hypotheses. Activity 4: Students will present their findings to the class in either a science fair board or PowerPoint format.

Ecosystems Learning Module 3: Elaborate

Career Pipeline Ecosystem Management

Objectives: A guest lecturer will present a real scenario of ecosystem management and solicit conclusions from the class while using the vocabulary of this unit, discussing the interrelationships among the organisms in the ecosystem, and discussing the use of methods for hypothesis testing. Materials and Preparation: - Guest lecturer Background Information: Teachers are encouraged to contact Dr. Merav Ben-David at the University of Wyoming, Department of Zoology and Physiology at 307-766-5307 or bendavid@uwyo.edu (email is likely best). She will likely arrange to have one of her graduate students speak.

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Students will be exposed to real life ecosystem management. The guest speaker will present research on ecosystem management using real scenarios and will solicit conclusions from the students. The speaker will also describe their role as a scientist. The speaker will discuss methods used in ecosystem management to assess working hypotheses and how they initially identified these hypotheses. The students will be encouraged to ask questions about their work, ecosystem management, and the career of a scientist. The students could identify vocabulary previously used in the classroom as the discussion ensues. When the speaker uses a word the students have recently learned they could all yell out loud, or simply write it down Although this could overpower the message of the speaker, it could provide focus and connection on the part of the students (teacher discretion). If this is part of the activity, please warn the speaker!

Ecosystems Learning Module 4: Explain

Changes in the coastal Alaskan ecosystem

Objectives: The students will be able to see both visual changes and numerical changes in a real example of an ecosystem that is currently experiencing changes among the biotic members. Materials and Preparation: - Read the following paper prior to the activity: Estes, J.A., M.T. Tinker, T.M. Williams, and D.F. Doak. 1998. Killer whale predation on sea otters linking oceanic and nearshore ecosystems. Science 282: 473-476. - Power Point presentation Killer whale predation on sea otters: how predation can cause major changes in an ecosystem **- Photos for Activity 1 are slides 9 and 10 in killer whale/sea otter presentation - Excel activity Worksheet. Background Information: Estes et al. 1998. Abstract: After nearly a century of recovery from overhunting, sea otter populations are in abrupt decline over large areas of western Alaska. Increased killer whale predation is the likely cause of these declines. Elevated sea urchin density and the consequent deforestation of kelp beds in the nearshore community demonstrate that the otters keystone role has been reduced or eliminated. This chain of interactions was probably initiated by anthropogenic changes in the offshore oceanic ecosystem.

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Students will look at two photographs of the same site at different times. The photographs show a kelp bed and coastal habitat before and after the killer whales began focusing their predation on sea otters. The before photo clearly shows large kelp while the second photo shows the newly formed urchin barrens. The students will write conclusions about the differences between the two habitats. The following questions can be presented to prompt the students: - What do you see? - What do you think happened? - What is different between the two photographs? - What have you learned that would explain the differences you saw?
Activity 2: Students will graph sea otter data to learn how to use Excel and to learn to visualize data. This will prepare students for the graphed data in Activity 3. The students will need to open Excel on a computer and then follow the instructions on the worksheet to graph the data. This can be done as a class or individually. Activity 3: Students will watch a power point presentation that gives the history of the orca, sea otter, urchin, kelp bed story. This will include photographs and basic graphs of the story. Copies of the actual graphs and figures from the scientific manuscript will be handed out and the students will work through understanding these graphs and figures with the teachers. This will allow students to follow the changes in the ecosystem over time and see the affects of disturbance on an ecosystem.

Unit Title Learning Module 5: Evaluate

Assessment of Ecosystem material

Objectives: Options: - Students will create their own ecosystems and describe the organisms as either predators, producers, consumers, or decomposers and the relationships between these organisms. The students will then need to describe a disturbance that happens to their ecosystem and the potential affects. Or. - Students will make predictions about what will happen to a specific ecosystem if a discount mega-store is built on the site and make conclusions about whether the construction should or should not happen. Materials and Preparation: - Background information/worksheet for the students if they choose the Mega-Store scenario. o Assessment Activity Lesson 5 Ecosystem Mngt. - Students may need access to the internet or another resource (teachers discretion) - Assessment Activity Lesson 5 Ecosystem Mngt. B worksheet for the create your own ecosystem activity Background Information: - In both activities, the students will need to identify the organisms in their ecosystem. They will need to identify these organisms by describing them as predators, producers, consumers, or decomposers. Then will then need to describe the relationships these organisms have with the other organisms in that ecosystem. Finally, the students will need to make predictions about what will happen to these organisms when a disturbance (either of their choice or when a large mega-store is built on their site) occurs.

Detailed description of the activities Activity 1: Students will have time to examine a question about a Mega-Store that has been proposed to be built at a specific location. The students will answer questions and make hypotheses from the standpoint of an ecosystem manager about whether the Mega-Store should be built. They will conclude by giving recommendations to the builders and planners.
OR-

Activity 2: Students will design their own fictional ecosystem. They will be encouraged to identify the players in the ecosystem using the vocabulary they have been using for the last week. They will also be encouraged to describe the potential relationships between the organisms. They will be assessed on whether this ecosystem contains producers, consumers, predators, and decomposers and the potential relationships between these organisms. Then the students will need to describe a disturbance and the results and affects of this disturbance on the organisms and the relationships within this ecosystem.