Distinguish between living things and nonliving things in an environment. Compare ecosystems, communities, and populations. Observing Environments Activity Science Terms 1-1 1. The purpose of this section is to introduce students to the path that energy travels through an ecosystem. Organisms are classified by how they obtain food.
Producers can make their own food using the energy of sunlight and nutrients in the soil.
The themes that can be focused on in this section are energy and unity and diversity. The food and energy in an ecosystem flows from the producers to the consumers and then to the decomposers. The decomposers return nutrients to the soil which can be used again by the producers. The producers capture light energy, which cannot be used by consumers and change it into food energy. The Earth's ecosystems vary greatly in both size and composition, the same kind of energy path is followed in all of them.