Unit 4-- An ecological detour

When I did my cursory review of the biology modeling curriculum before the start of the school year, I somehow neglected to notice the utter lack of ecology included.  I guess I assumed when I saw food chains/food webs that the curriculum would somehow address ecology and interdependence in that section.  Well, you know what happens when you ASS-ume...

I believe something like 18% of my state's end of course exam is on ecology and interdependence, including human effects on ecosystems, carrying capacities, and succession.  Not to mention it's its own entire section in my state standards.  And uh, none of this stuff is anywhere in the curriculum as written.

So, the past few days have been "cram everything about ecology into a few days while pretending we're just learning about food chains."  Yay.  But it fit better here than anywhere upcoming.

I keep trying to relate everything back to energy, so it kind of makes sense with the unit.

Here's the cool part:  I'm reusing some of my previous ecology materials, but with a modeling spin.  And it seems to be working decently.  For example, I gave my students a what I think is an easy handout entitled "Deer:  Predation or Starvation" which has them analyzing and graphing the data of a standard wolf reintroduction scenario.  Oh, how my students moaned and complained about this activity last year!  The had so incredibly much trouble with manipulation and graphing of the data.

But this year, even my standard students got through it relatively uneventfully.  We used it for a segue into defining the term "carrying capacity," and they got it no problem.  I threw all sorts of carrying capacity scenarios out at them, and at least 85% of the students could predict and analyze what would happen.

Succession is another topic that we went through at warp speed, but I think they just might have gotten it.  (We haven't finished it yet with my standard class, which will be the true baseline for comparison)  We spent days on succession in previous years-- looking at pictures, drawing flipbooks, reading scenarios, etc.  Last year, I remember one of my brighter students telling me succession was the hardest thing in biology.

This year, I literally just cut up succession timeline pictures and put them in baggies-- I did one bag of pond succession and one bag of forest succession.  I told them to put each baggie of pictures in order and storyboard it on their whiteboard.  We discussed our observations and what we thought was happening, and defined the terms "ecological succession" and "climax community."  Then we discussed what might have caused the succession, divided the causes into categories, and voila!  We gave the categories the names primary succession and secondary succession.  And I sent them home with a Mount Saint Helens article for homework that will hopefully embed a few more related terms in their heads.  I mean, I would have loved to have done more, but we spent maybe 30 minutes on the topic.  From the discussion, the understanding seemed as good or better as compared to the years I've spent days on the topic!

It's the small battles, I suppose.

The downside:  we are seriously behind now.  Like, majorly, will-not-get-through-all-the-curriculum, what am I going to cut behind.  The only upside is that I'm not any more behind than I was this point last year, and my students did fine on the EOC...