Ecosystems: Food Chains

This is an informal assessment to make sure the students understood the differences between producers, consumers, decomposers AND the steps of a food chain. The students were directed to complete the following:

Create a food chain that follows the correct order. It must include a source of energy, one producer, two consumers, and a decomposer. It must also have labels, a picture, and the title of the organism (producer, consumer, decomposer).

Yellow paper- sunlight

Green paper- producer

Orange paper- consumers

Brown paper- decomposers

Here is what they came up with:

Google Earth Landforms Project

Google Earth Landforms Project

As a part of our landforms unit, we’ve been using Google Earth in the classroom. Now it’s time for you to use it to complete a project!

Assignment: Choose one landform from those we have studied - mountain, volcano, delta, canyon, glacier, mesa, etc. Research a real life example of that landform and locate it on Google Earth. Hint: Many national parks have amazing landforms! Record the name and location of the landform (absolute and/or relative location) so you can find it again later. Research and record how that landform was created. Be able to share this information with the class. While you are teaching the class, you also need to have seven accurate facts about your landform. You may also wish to demonstrate one interesting feature of the Google Earth program.

Here are some of the results-

Changes to make for next time: 

• Spend more time working with GOOGLE EARTH before and during the project.
• Have the students create a powerpoint to use during the actual presentation.

Landforms

The fifth grade curriculum requires us to teach Landforms in Science. As with most concepts in Science, this is one that can be a bit difficult to understand AND remember. Therefore towards the end of our unit I pulled out the markers and large paper and got started... I started to draw various landforms on the large paper and explain what they were. When it all came together it resulted in what looked like a dinosaur. From there I had the students create pictures that incorporated various landforms in creative ways- many chose to continue on the path of dinosaurs (since they are interested in them) but some really added a lot to it (even pulling from our weather unit that we did previously).

Here is the Project Poster for the hallway:

These are some of the outcomes:

This one incorporates a lot of weather information as well:

It is hard to see but they even cover the layers of the rainforest (the trees) which I taught them as a mini lesson- we are moving on to Ecosystems next.