What a treat, I had every 7th grade student through my room today!!! You were all wonderful while working to draw and identify the producers in the pond and its surroundings.
| 2013-05-02_plant_id_page.pdf |
 Today for our 5th visit we were focusing on 2 things:
1. What effects did the heavy rains have on the pond? 2. Stand by an example of a producer and make an accurate , detailed drawing of the plant/ tree/ shrub. Back in Today you used the activ expressions to take a practice test on the vocabulary we are using. You all did great on this self paced quiz and we will try it again tomorrow. if you remember your number look on the attached PDF to check your score. We set up the journals for our trip to the pond tomorrow. we will focus on the producers in our ecosystem.
 Today you had the complex task of creating a layered food web showing the feeding relationships in a more complex ecosystem. This was best done by first identifying the producers and then the primary consumers. After this the web became really complex!
 While many of you were out on your field trip the rest of us made a layered food web by grouping the organisms in the Mono Lake ecosystem according to what they eat. If you were absent today I have attached the copy of the food web outline for you to print and complete at home or you can pick one up from under the activ board and do on Monday evening. 
After analyzing and organized food web we set off to the Frog pond for our 4th field visit. It was a warm day and we saw very few frogs but lots of caddis fly larvae and our big excitement was seeing dozens of pond skaters just sitting on a log. Today you recorded 3 interactions that you noticed as well as the usual data gathering. Also today we spent some time pulling scotch broom from our ecosystem. Please enjoy the girl power video!!
Yesterday you all watched a program about Mono Lake in California. I was thrilled to see that you learned a lot from the movie and was happy to see that your understanding of abiotic and biotic factors in an environment are now pretty solid. Today we looked closer at the biotic interactions and determined that for the most part it is all about feeding relationships, getting energy to survive! From this thinking you determined a food chain and then worked on the more complex task of building a food web showing all the energy transfers (through the feeding relationships) in the Mono Lake ecosystem. Below are pictures of the food webs you created. look at the mono lake website for more information on this beautiful place. http://monolake.org/
looking at the abiotic data and the observation data you all made a decision as to whether you thought the pond was a healthy ecosystem. Most group said yes because the abiotic factors were all in the optimum range and there is life i the pond. some of you felt that the dissolved oxygen was on the edge of the optimum range and so had concerns about that. fourth period echo your concerns as they found at the end of the day that the Dissolved oxygen was really low. You asked two big questions? Why is there so little dissolved oxygen in the pond? How can we increase the amount of oxygen in the water?  Why are there tadpoles on the rocks?
Yesterday and today we worked on two items. We finished watching the Jane Goodall movie about her long term study of the Chimpanzees in Gombe. Secondly you did some research into the abiotic factors that we are gathering data about from the frog pond. Did you identify the following from the movie? 1. An individual? 2. Two examples of a population? 2. Two examples of a community?
 Can you spot the frog amongst the grasses? Today we did a lengthy field visit where you; 1. made observations 2. sketched an individual of a species of your choice. 3. Collected abiotic data Today you also completed the Virus question and turned in the sheet to the folder on the shelf.
| Announcements
I am starting to use this website as a resource. I will not use it as the daily lesson updates but simply as a resource. Mrs FrearsonI teach 7th grade science and reading. ArchivesOctober 2013 | ||||||||||||||||||
RSS Feed