We are now in our second semester of Imaginary Island work – and it’s time to put some life on the islands!
First we reviewed our work so far, remembering how our islands formed, the factors that cause the climate of our islands, and all the way up to biomes.
Next I read aloud “Pass the Energy, Please!” by Barbara Shaw McKinney. This was a great last minute find that I didn’t think would come in from our library in time, but it did! The book reviews the sun as the source of all energy and takes the reader through five food chains of different lengths, each one in a different ecosystem, and finishes by reminding us that everything returns to scavengers, decomposers, and the earth. The book is written in verse and all the kids liked the rhythm of the words.
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Then I gave quick review of ecological organization levels, ecosystems, food webs and food chains. We reviewed terms like herbivore, omnivore, carnivore, biotic, and abiotic. They’ll be diving more deeply into ecosystems over the next few weeks so all these terms will be used many times and become very comfortable.
I’d printed out a picture showing Interdependent Relationships in a Deciduous Forest from exploringnature.org. She does have the same type of picture for a few other ecosystems, you can find them with this link.
ExploringNature.org is a wonderful resource, and is well worth a browse. It covers such a wide range of topics and I think sometimes the resources overlap with each other, but there are some real gems if you have the patience to dig through.
The worksheet I printed only shows life/biotic factors. Before making copies I drew in sunlight, water, rocks, and air – abiotic factors – with a sharpie. With a 3D energy pyramid from twinkl.com as our reference we used one color for each factor in the ecosystem and then listed them out. Reviewing these different components will be a reference as they begin to choose and populate an ecosystem on their island.