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. As each group presents its plan, the entire class critiques the group plans. The class develops a list of ways human communities and ecosystems are similar and ways they are different.