Students will create animals that have adaptations that would enable them to survive in environments that evolve after they have learned about Classification and the Animal Kingdom.

In this life science-focused activity, students will pretend to have internships as environmental scientists as they research why exactly water is essential for life. They will collect and analyze data to help them calculate about how much water they use on a daily basis and consider where cuts can be made. Following the virtual experience, students will calculate approximately how much water each person would need per day to survive on Mars. They will consider how much of this water could be reused, and they will determine how much water the people on Mars need to survive until the shuttle returns from Earth. Student groups will ultimately develop a plan that maps out water use until the shuttle returns, and they will review each other’s ideas as they search for the most efficient and realistic plan.

Google Expeditions is an excellent app for giving students a virtual reality experience, allowing students to visit and experience new places and locations. This activity takes students on a virtual field trip through six different ecosystems. This resource was developed as a part of the Creating Lessons Using Transformative Technology - Platteville Public Schools OER Grant.

This unit includes five nature journaling experiences implemented at High Marq Environmental Charter School during the 2021-22 school year. They are a bit of a grab bag in terms of subject and skills focus, but all included practices from How to Teach Nature Journaling by Emilie Lygren and John Muir Laws. Please Remix this template for your purposes.

Students write imaginative classified ads about habitats and then play a game to match specific animals with the
animal’s native habitat or home.

This link has a teacher guide, 3 student graphing activity sheets, rubric and a complete description of the activities related to climate change and invasive species.

In the strategic building game Lakeland, you’ve decided to build a new town called Lakeland. In order to grow your town and keep your people alive, you need food and resources.

Luckily, you’ve got some friendly advisors to help you get started. Your Farm Advisor shows you how to grow corn. Now your people have food! Then you start a dairy farm. People love dairy. Milk, cheese, ice cream… what could go wrong?

As it turns out, a lot. Cows don’t just produce milk. They also produce lots and lots of poop, which means the lakes your people love are about to turn into a toxic cesspool of blue-green algae. Your mission: grow your town without destroying their lakes.

This game puts kids in charge of building their own town. Players add houses and farms, export produce, and manage resources like food, money, and manure. Students will get an introduction to the complex relationship between farming, soil nutrition, and lake pollution.

This guide to OpenSciEd unit 7.5: Ecosystem Dynamics and Biodiversity includes: Lesson pacing; and Assessment guidance. School districts that use The Teacher Clarity Playbook by Fisher and Frey Playbook will benefit from using this guide. Each lesson is labeled by a number and letter (ie: 3a) and contains the original resource three-dimensional standards as Lesson Level Performance Expectations. We have broken those PEs into student-friendly Learning Intentions and Success Criteria, which can be posted on boards or digital slides and used for assessment criteria.  

This curriculum guide contains pacing, instruction, prior knowledge, and assessment guidance to accompany the OpenSciEd unit 7.5 Ecosystem Dynamics and Biodiversity. For schools who use Fisher and Frey's The Teacher Clarity Playbook, you'll find student-friendly learning intentions and success criteria for every lesson (indicated by a number and letter, ie: 4b), drawn from the OSE three dimensional performance expectations. These can be posted on slides or boards in classrooms to make learning visible for students and help design assessment criteria.   

The winter severity index (WSI) is a measurement to help gauge the effects of the winter weather on
deer survival. The index was developed in the early 1970’s and is calculated by adding the number of
days with 18 inches or more of snow on the ground to the number of days when the minimum
temperatures were 0◦
F or below. In general, the severity of the winter is based on the total number of
points accumulated over the collection period. A winter with an index of less than 50 is considered mild,
50 to 79 is moderate, 80 to 99 is severe, and over 100 is very severe.