Blog Post Week 5

Week 5

We began lab by looking at our fast plants from two weeks ago. They have grown significantly and may bud flowers in the next week! We also were able to observe the new butterflies, our home only had one to observe while others had 3 or 4.

We then discussed our read, write, and watch responses with both our tables and the whole class. This allowed us to remind ourselves of the NGSS study we reviewed. Then we were able to continue our activity from last week. We reviewed the lab activity created and graded it on a rubric. This was nice to further my understanding of the 5E lesson plan. 

Then we started on our new focus of ecology. Ecology is the study of the relationships between living organisms including humans, and their physical environment. We also investigated biomes, habitats, and ecosystems. A biome is a large-scale category of ecosystems that have similar climate conditions and similar dominant types of plants and animals. Habitats are specific places where a particular community of organisms live, for example, tundras and grasslands. An ecosystem is a community of living things and nonliving things that interact with each other in a specific environment, for example, a coral reef. 

    In our table groups, we watched short videos to observe a habitat. Our group watched the video about dolphins. Here we observed how smart the dolphins are by using their tails and swimming in a circle, forcing fish to the surface of the water so the dolphins can eat them easier. It was interesting to see that two dolphins worked together to do this because that means they had to communicate with each other.

    We then talked about food chains and food webs. A food chain describes who eats whom starting with the producer. Food webs show four food chains. They also show how different living things are connected through food. An example of a food web is milkweed (producer) -> butterfly -> robin -> fox (apex predator). As you move up each trophic level only 10% of the energy is retained; most energy is lost through heat.

    Finally, we started our hands-on activity, we worked with our table groups to create a slide on Jamboard for a specific biome. Our group focused on the tundra, for our food web we had lichens and grass as our producers, and our apex predator was the polar bear. We also learned that tundras have short growing seasons because of their frigid temperatures. During summers the weather ranges from 37°F - 54°F. I enjoyed this lesson because it was a refresher to concepts I learned in elementary school, and have barely worked with since.