Chapter Overview
This chapter provides the teacher with an opportunity to open the eyes of students
to the seemingly simple and yet very complex issues in their environment. The chapter starts with a challenge – to create a booklet addressing one current environmental issue, with the primary purpose of educating a targeted audience. The challenge becomes clearer as the students progress through the nine hands-on activities that
they do before they complete the Chapter Challenge. After learning about diversity in living things in Activity 1, the students delve into relationships among organisms in terms of who eats whom found in Activity 2 and energy flows in Activity 3. The students then deal with the factors that affect population size in Activity 4 followed by competition among organisms in Activity 5. In Activity 6, the students learn about succession. Succession provides a better understanding of what happened before
in the environment, which then leads to the question, “What will happen next?”
Since the ecosystem necessarily includes the abiotic component, Activities 7, 8, and 9 cover the water cycle, the carbon and oxygen cycle in the processes of photosynthesis and respiration, and the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle, respectively. Each of the nine activities ends with a reflection where students are redirected and refocused to the Chapter Challenge found in the very beginning of the chapter. |