Objectives |
| The sun?s energy is used by plants and transferred up the food chain. All living organisms play a specific and important role in the ecosystem. Living organisms in a wetland ecosystem are interconnected in many ways.
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ND Standards Addressed |
| SC Life Science |
MN Standards Addressed |
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MB Standards Addressed |
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Time Requirement |
| 50 Minutes |
Procedure/Outline |
| Create name tags for students of plants and animals in an ecosystem. Be sure to include sun, water, soil, a variety of plants, herbivores and carnivores. Then have students sit on the floor in a circle. Hand out name tags to students. Take a ball of yarn and give to the person with sun name tag. Begin by making a few simple food chains. Teacher asks: Who needs the sun? Duckweed, or any other plant. You extend the yarn string towards the person holding the duckweed card. Who eats duckweed? Mallards. Who eats mallards? Fox. Yarn now connects all in food chain. To create a more complex relationship chain, begin with any component you want and let them hold the end of the yarn. Connect it to another component of the ecosystem that it needs to survive. Continue in this way until everyone is a part of the web. Ask students what they think would happen to the ecosystem of one of the components were to be removed? To simulate this for the group, choose one component such as the mosquito, leech or skunk and ask them to gently tug and shake the strings they are holding on to. Any others who feel a tug or shake should do the same and soon you will notice that the entire web is shaking. This helps to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all components within an ecosystem. |
Modifications/Adatption/Extensions |
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Assessments |
| Follow up questions. How are the various components of a wetland ecosystem connected? Give some examples. Could some of the members of our wetland ecosystem be a part of another ecosystem such as a forest or grassland? Explain. What happens if we lose a component of an ecosystem? |
Other Comments |
| Extension Activity: Have students create their own wetland food web. Students can draw or paste a variety of different wetland plants and animals onto a poster and show the relationships between them by drawing arrows. The arrows should show the flow of energy from one level of the food web to the next. |
