Jennifer B. Esty
There are several skills that the students will need to be able to successfully complete this curriculum unit. In my experience, my students rarely have any of them. This section of the curriculum is designed to give the students the skills they need to complete the rest of the unit.
The primary skill the students will need to complete this curriculum is identification of organisms. This section of the unit applies to New Haven Science Standard 3.3e. In my experience, my students typically have trouble identifying something as common as a dandelion or telling the difference between an oak leaf and a maple leaf. As a result, we will start with the basics. A good approach to this is to ask the students to think about how they might teach their child to identify different leaf shapes. For example, some leaves will look mostly triangular while others will look more circular. If a student is thinking about how her young child will learn the different shapes, she will also learn them herself.
Most of the organisms we will identify will be plants; they do not move around the way animals do, so they will not flee at approaching scientist. So, one of the first things we will look at is the way that plants are structured. In other words, we identify roots, shoots, leaves, twigs, buds, etc. Much of this is simply a vocabulary lesson. But, it is generally necessary because my English speaking students rarely have been taught the different parts of the plant and my non-English speaking students do not always know the English words for the plant anatomy. We will also look at the difference between alternate leave and opposite leaves, compound leaves and simple leaves, and other basic plant terms. Some of the plant identification books are organized according to leaf type, so this sort of introduction is especially useful. If the weather cooperates, we will take the plant identification books outside and practice on the trees out in the park across the street. We are gifted with a very wide variety of trees in the park that are frequently found in the woods around New Haven, so identifying them is very good practice. This section of the unit addresses New Haven Science Standard 1.2a.
After plants, the most common organisms likely to be encountered are birds. We will look into basic aviary anatomy. The students need be able to quickly identify a bird by its body size, tail shape, plumage color, beak shape, and other similar readily visible features.
Another skill that the students will need is the ability to put an organism into the proper biological family. Not only is this in support of New Haven science performance standard 3.3e, but it is also important for the students who expect to continue with their biological education beyond high school. So, we will look at the hierarchy of organisms living here on Earth. We will look most specifically at the plant kingdom and at the plants we are most likely to encounter in the local ecosystems we will study. Studying the way that the plants are related will likely help the students remember the names of the plants more easily. Furthermore, the students in class are going to need to include the scientific names of many local plants in their work later in the unit.
Similar to organizing organisms into biological hierarchies, students need to be able to organize organisms into trophic levels. This addresses the New Haven Science Standard 1.2a. All ecosystems have various trophic levels and every organism has a place in one of the trophic levels. An exercise that I like to do with the students is to take them outside with a clip board and have them organize all of the organisms they see into different trophic levels. It is amazing how much can be seen even in a city park. Abandoned, overgrown lots work really well for this, too.
The last piece of essential prior knowledge we will cover is some basic statistics. Because we will be extrapolating results from data obtained from small sample plots, it is important to understand the tools needed to make sense of the data collected. So, we will look at terms like mean, median, bell curve, etc; all of which addresses New Haven Science Standard 1.2d. We will also look at the way that data analysis and skew the results in one direction or another. This topic ties into an ongoing theme for my classes which is making decisions. Much of the data reported on TV or in the news is created by persons who have been paid to make the data appear to support one idea or another. By looking at some of the extreme ways that data can be manipulated, I hope to encourage my students to more carefully consider the information they hear and read.
