Week 9: Living Things
Weeks 7, 8, and 9 make up a three-week cycle about living things (Biosphere). Currently, you are in Week C: Teacher As Designer.

This week, apply what you have learned about effective activities and the Biosphere to create your own lesson. Use the resources listed under Readings, discuss your ideas with your teammates, then submit your lesson to your Portfolio. Read and respond to your teammates' lessons in discussion and then rate them in the Portfolio.

Assignments

Submit your individual classroom application with goals, activities and assessment and a rationale using the criteria to your Portfolio in the Classroom for a grade.

Submit your peer review (rate) of each other’s classroom applications to your Portfolio in the Classroom for a grade.

Essential Questions about Living Things
Design your activities to elicit your students' questions, and to help them to think about the essential questions you have been addressing:

• How do plants and animals live and die?
• How do occurrences in other spheres affect the life and death of plants and animals?
• How do plants and animals affect the land?
• How do plants and animals affect each other?
• How is decomposition both an end and a beginning?
• How does the terrarium support the life needs of the plants and animals?

Readings

In the National Science Education Standards what children understand about living things is described for Life Science CONTENT STANDARD C: As a result of activities in grades K-4, all students should develop understanding of the characteristics of organisms, life cycles of organisms, and organisms and environments:

• "In lower elementary grades, many children associate 'life' with any objects that are active in any way. This view of life develops into one in which movement becomes the defining characteristic. Eventually children incorporate other concepts, such as eating, breathing, and reproducing to define life.
• In classroom activities such as classification, younger elementary students generally use mutually exclusive rather than hierarchical categories. Young children, for example, will use two groups, but older children will use several groups at the same time. Students do not consistently use classification schemes similar to those used by biologists until the upper elementary grades.
• As students investigate the life cycles of organisms, teachers might observe that young children do not understand the continuity of life from, for example, seed to seedling or larvae to pupae to adult. But teachers will notice that by second grade, most students know that children resemble their parents. Students can also differentiate learned from inherited characteristics. However, students might hold some naive thoughts about inheritance, including the belief that traits are inherited from only one parent, that certain traits are inherited exclusively from one parent or the other, or that all traits are simply a blend of characteristics from each parent.
• Young children think concretely about individual organisms. For example, animals are associated with pets or with animals kept in a zoo. The idea that organisms depend on their environment (including other organisms in some cases) is not well developed in young children. In grades K-4, the focus should be on establishing the primary association of organisms with their environments and the secondary ideas of dependence on various aspects of the environment and of behaviors that help various animals survive. Lower elementary students can understand the food link between two organisms."

Web Sites

• The Great Plant Escape Help Detective Le Plant and his partners Bud and Sprout unlock the amazing mysteries of plants. Students solve one of six cases, such as "Detective Le Plant needs your help to solve the mystery of plant life! To solve this case, you must identify the different parts of plants, what each part does, and how plants grow. Good luck!"
• Plowing Through Garbage The activities on this site provide students with experiences about Earthworm structure, where and how Earthworms live, and Earthworm behavior. Students begin by collecting worms to study in the classroom. They observe some of the special structures of Earthworms, specifically the bristles or setae, the ring-like segments, and the clitellum. Students explore how these structures help Earthworms function and survive. Students also gain experience in asking questions and designing investigations as they compare the worms' behavior under varying conditions. Then students vary the worms' environment to see how they respond to differences in light, temperature, and moisture. Finally, students examine how the behavior of Earthworms affects their environment.
• Plants and Our Environment Developed by students for students, this site has a Virtual Garden Tour. "This web site is about plants. You will learn about how plants grow and the different parts of a plant. We will tell you how seeds travel and what bees do to help plants. At our web site, you will also learn about plants and their relationship with animals. Students and teachers, be sure to check out our page with plant activities. Please sign our guestbook and let us know what you think. We created a survey for you to fill out because we would like to learn about plants and animals where you live."

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