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. Cooperative groups identify the life cycles of the organisms in habitat bottles. Students locate organisms on the school grounds and determine the life cycle stage that the organism is in.