Ecosystems Curriculum

Introduction

Suggestions from Teachers

Below is a list of suggestions from teachers who have tested the module.

• "Revisiting activities in the earlier lessons after completing later lessons resulted in much deeper understanding for my students. This was especially so for the Web of Life Game [Section 1]. It gave them a good basis that they expanded upon when we did the activities again."
• "It's important to think about how you time the unit. For instance, make sure that you set up the worm tanks well in advance of the end of the year and before the unit ends so you are able to include the findings in the unit discussions [Section 3]."
• "I used white boards to have students create causal diagrams, for example in the story about parachuting cats into Borneo [Section 6]. That way they could modify them easily as they understood more about the situation."
• "My students kept notes in their science journals so that they could go back and revisit previous activities after they had learned new things."
• "I had my students do lots of drawing and writing as a way to see how they were making sense of the ideas. Even though some of the ideas are complex, I had a good sense of what my students understood and they grasped a lot more than I would have predicted."