Jacob Burkart

EDU 303

Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate

Your job is to design a lesson plan that includes specific directions for each area.
You need to include the resources you will use, video links or website links that will
be necessary to teach this lesson. Your lesson needs enough details that a
substitute teacher could teach this lesson.

5E Lesson Plan Template

State lesson objectives:
1. Copy and paste ND Science Standard (with code)

Performance Standard 3-LS4-3 - Construct an argument with evidence that in a

particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some
cannot survive at all.
Performance Standard 5-LS2-1 - Develop a model to describe the movement of
matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.
LS2.A: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems -The food of almost any kind of
animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which
some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants.
Some organisms, such as fungi and bacteria, break down dead organisms (both
plants or plant parts and animals) and therefore operate as “decomposers.”
Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. A
healthy ecosystem is a balanced ecosystem. Newly introduced species can damage
the balance of an ecosystem.

2. What should students know and be able to do? How will you know they are
able to do “it” (assessment)?
Students should know how to look at a food chain and determine how important each
piece of the food chain is. They will then construct an argument with evidence to
show that they understood the lesson.

Resources needed to teach this lesson:

Lesson Plan Taken (with some copy and paste) from “What Happens When An
Environment Changes?” by Sherri Brown, Georgia Drury, Marcelle Gianelloni, and
Doug McCoy.
Laminated one 8.5 x 11” wearable factor card per student.
One Information Sheet per factor
Ball of Yarn

Phenomena -
What Happens When an Environment changes? What is the importance of food
chains?

Engage
The teacher’s job is to Capture student interest
Encourage questions/critical thinking
Uncover previous knowledge (KWL)
Use picture books, video, visuals, questions

Engage the students first by reading this book on food chains and the importance of them.

You can start this lesson by having students list out the animals, plants, and fungi that they
see that they see frequently. This will then lead to a discussion on animals. After this, the
lists will be combined to a class table of animals, fungi, and plants. Then students will go
outside and look at the soil to see what all they can find based on their class tables.

Explore
Provide hands on investigative inquiry for students to learn about the objective
List questions you will ask.
Facilitate discussions as students work in small groups to explore answers
Based on what you find outside, you can engage the students in a discussion to talk
More about what they found.

I would also haved students have a discussion on the animals on what they eat. How
would the disappearance of the selected form of life affect the rest of the food web?

Students will then take the factor cards they have been given to a student at random.
As a class, you will read the information sheets together to avoid confusion on how
they should be read. Then you will hand out the sheets that the students need for
their own card that they got. They will be doing research on their own to learn more
about their place on the food chain.
Then have the students stand in a circle and then toss a ball of yarn around to create
a food web.
You could also have students visit each other to determine if that is the correct
connection. This will display how energy is being transfered and how important it is.
For further instruction, you could cut out parts of the yarn to demonstrate how
important that section was. Another option is that you could have the students lightly
tug on the yarn to show how important it is.
What happens if we replace it and get rid of something else?
How would this also effect us?
How important are the parts of the food chain?
How is energy transferred?
Here are some more questions students can record in their notebooks.
Explain
Teacher Introduce terms, vocabulary
Teacher builds background knowledge by providing information
Connect content information to what students discovered in exploration phase
Students take notes, watch informational videos, read articles to build knowledge
about the objective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtb3I8Vzlfg

https://www.pbs.org/video/science-trek-food-web/
(do not show the whole video as it is 30 minutes long)

Vocabulary to teach -

ecosystem, - a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical

environment
producer (e.g., tree, grass), - an organism which produces its own food through
photosynthesis.
herbivore (e.g., deer, rabbit), - eats vegetation
carnivore (e.g., fox, hawk, owl, bobcat, snake, fish, bat) - eats meat
detritivore (e.g., earthworm, fungi). - an animal which feeds on dead organic material,
especially plant detritus

While some fungi and bacteria are decomposers because they can break down
matter, earthworms and vultures are not technically “decomposers” because they
cannot do so. We discussed how some animals were omnivores as they consumed
both plant and animal materials; for instance, cardinals eat earthworms (animal) as
well as seeds and berries (plant materials).

What skills will students need to learn the objective?

The students will need investigation skills to determine how organisms can survive in
this environment.

Elaborate/Apply learning
Designed to help students extend their knowledge
Students apply key vocabulary
Applies knowledge to everyday life

Provide problem solving task, real world task, practice skill in a variety of ways
Have students come up with their own food web. Have them pick plants, animals, or
fungi to learn how they are relied on or rely on different things to contribute to their
environment. For this, students will split into groups of four to create their own poster
for their food web. While students will construct their own later, this is to get students
talking, creating, and exploring on their own.
You could also use a free Annenberg online simulation to discuss more with the
class. https://www.learner.org/series/the-habitable-planet-a-systems-approach-to-
environmental-science/ecology-lab/

Evaluate: Students demonstrate they have learned the learning objectives

Assess student progress through observations and journals
How will YOU know your students learned?

Students will answer true and false, multiple-choice, and open- response questions
regarding food web, producers, and endangered species. Students will also draw
food webs with arrows to show how energy is transfered.

Students will then construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat
some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at
all. (The objective for this lesson)
Jacob Burkart
EDU 303

Assessments
Formative – For a formative assessment, you can also use the food webs that they design as a
group to assess how they are doing during the lesson. This can be graded by how many parts
they got right and by showing that they understand the content being presented. I got this from
the NSTA, Uncovering Student Ideas in Science, Volume 3: Another 25 Formative Assessment
Probes, Rotting Apple, by Page Keely. https://www.nsta.org/lesson-plan/rotting-apple-0
This assessment is meant to connect students from the food web to decomposition. How are they
similair? Do they see how important this is for the organisms in the environment? How does this
help?

From the NSTA -

https://s3.amazonaws.com/nstacontent/sc1407_26.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIMRSQAV7P6
X4QIKQ&Expires=1707005740&Signature=Cd6pTIml4ubtvubVwnSXSC9AUTU%3d
“Habitat Change: Formative Assessment of a Cautionary Word” by Page Keeley
I chose habitat change as another to show how important that habitat and environment is for the
organisms. This could let the students show what they already know about this.

Summative – I found this summative assessment from which could be helpful in creating their
own food webs for an assessment. There is also this article from the NSTA that could be
followed in them making their food web. The purpose of having them label the organisms and
create a food web is so that the students understand why energy transfers the way it does and
why each organism is important. It will be graded on how many organisms they include. Does it
have a start point and an end point? Does the energy transfer make sense? Students will be
graded on proficiency and accuracy of information on their complete food webs..You could also
follow the grading rubric below but with the change implemented that relates to their grade level
as shown below.

https://www.nsta.org/science-and-children/science-and-children-julyaugust-2022/starting-science
By Jesse Wilcox, Shawna Person, and Catherine Lyons
http://www.brunswick.k12.me.us/jseheult/files/2017/06/EcologyFoodWebSummativeAssessmen
t.pdf. Brunswick K-12.