Ecosystem of a Rotting Log

We went into the woods behind the library today and investigated the ecosystem of a rotting log. A lot of pines had been cut about 10-15 years ago and left to rot. We rolled some over, dug through the debris and attempted to catalogue and identify all the organisms that we found. Lots of decomposers, scavenges, and the some of the predators that prey upon them were found. We used a short guide book to help identify some of the organisms. Here is a GoogleDoc of that guide. We found fungi, termites, ants, slugs, snails, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, worms, beetles and beetle larvae, springtails, crickets, and a salamander.

Bird Behavior Projects

Today we went over the calendar for the bird behavior projects. We looked at due dates for each part of the project. We will start the projects this week and hopefully have them finished by November 12th.
The first due date is October 8th, when everyone needs to have a pretty good idea of the question that they will be investigating.

A few of the groups that hadn't presented their articles yesterday had a chance to do that today. We learned more about Lemming populations, Lynx and Hare populations, and the inadvertent affects of spraying DDT in Borneo during the 1940's.

We put three different types of bread (with and without preservatives) in baggies along with apple, orange, a carrot to watch them rot over time. We will photograph them regularly.

Ecology Issues and Cycles

Today we read and shared three articles about patterns and cycles in ecology. The class was split into three groups. Each group read a different article and then taught the topic to the rest of the class. Here are links to GoogleDocs for each article:
Lemmings
Lynx and Hares
Cats in Borneo
Homework due tomorrow. Read last section of the handout and answer questions 2,3,4.
Link to reading: Communities and Ecosystems.

Catching Up

We have been looking at ecological systems and cycles within systems. We have played a simulation game that replicates food webs and how different species interact within a food web and what happens when a member of the food web is removed. After playing the game several times we modified the rules to make it a more realistic model of the system.
Lots of new vocabulary words and definitions. Click the links to download them as GoogleDocs.
Ecology Notes #1
Ecology Notes #2
We will be starting our bird projects soon.

Tennis Balls

We dropped tennis balls from different heights and onto different surfaces, then measured how high they bounced and how many times they bounced.  We tried different ways to measure our results using meter sticks. With this data we then created simple graphs to show our results.

Dropping the Ball

We tried out our ball dropping investigations today. Each team got a tennis ball and a meter stick. They gathered their data and some of them even analyzed their results. We measured how high the ball would bounce after being dropped from a set height. We also measured how high it would bounce for each consecutive bounce until it stopped bouncing. We counted the number of bounces when dropped from different heights. Each group then shared their processes and results and compared how they took their notes and designed their investigations.

New Year and New Students

A new school year and a new group of students.
We are starting class with looking at how to do a science investigation.
We started with the question, What will happen when I drop a ball? Then we went on to clarify exactly how we would set up a procedure to find the answer to this question. What sort of ball? From what height? Onto what sort of surface? How will we measure our results?
Then we tried it out in groups of 1, 2, or 3.