Students go outside and identify an organism's relationships to other living things. The class adds organisms to the ecosystem tube designed in Lesson 3 and describes how energy in the tube is passed from organism to organism. Groups draw a food chain, which includes organisms from their habitat bottles. Students design a bulletin board to show the interactions of a grassland ecosystem. They draw and construct several food chains and diagram ways organisms might interact within the ecosystem they designed in Lesson 3.
Students play a game that matches organisms to their niches.
Students design an interrelationship map that shows the connections of some niches. Students observe a model of the water cycle. They design representations of the water and carbon cycles in plastic beverage bottles. They build a compost tube to observe part of the mineral cycle and plant bean seeds to study a life cycle. Students conduct investigations on decomposition.