Students locate organisms on the school grounds and determine the life cycle stage that the organism is in. Students identify changes that were made by a group member in their ecosystem triorama. Students conduct soil investigations and explore interrelationships, diversity, and changes present on the school grounds. They attend a field trip to an ecosystem and participate in the same investigations and exploration stations that they did on the school grounds. They compare the data gathered on the field trip to the data from the school grounds.
Students spend some time alone to observe nature.
Some components, relationships, and energy sources of human communities are similar to those that exist in ecosystems. Students develop a list of components and services of a human community. The class listens to the reading of The Best Town in the World, by Byrd Baylor, and identifies components and relationships of a community described by the author. Pairs of students make collages of human communities. Cooperative groups redesign the part of the human community they drew in Lesson 1 or develop a new plan for a section of a human community.