Every year as part of the New Haven Public Schools Science curriculum, teachers in the second grade implement a unit on the lifecycle of the Painted Lady butterfly (
Vanessa cardui
). However, the resources that accompany the Science and Technology for Children's kit, limits its scope to observing the changes that occur from the egg to the full grown butterfly without covering in any depth its habitat, communities, environment, ecosystem, food chain, and food web. Thus, this unit attempts to enrich the kit by expanding on the concepts related to the importance that the habitat has to the living organisms and the dependence on maintaining in equilibrium the web of life of that given ecosystem.
Few are the students who at the sight of a butterfly, a bird, or a fury animal, do not show interest in learning more about them. At the same time, it does not cease to amaze me how, at the sight of a spider, the first instinct is to step on it and kill it. It is my hope that through their participation in the activities in this unit, students will be able to explain the reasons why that spider, worm, or other insect has the right to continue to be alive after their encounter.
I have chosen to focus this unit on cycles of life in an urban habitat as a way to make the concepts and important ideas of ecology and biodiversity concrete to the students' everyday living and as a complement to the unit on the butterfly life cycle. Thus, the concepts of habitats, communities, and environment, the connections among them, ecosystems, food chains, webs and pyramids, are introduced based on those organisms that live in local urban habitats. Late during the spring semester we will contextualize the previous concepts to the butterfly life cycle.
Through these activities, students will make direct observations on how the seasons affect the life cycle, the migration, and habitat of the diverse organisms. Through the students' active participation in the accompanying lessons, by the time they complete this unit, the students will have explored and compared urban and other local habitats to learn about biodiversity, made direct observations and created their own experiments to describe some basic factors that contribute to biodiversity, modeled some of the factors that decrease biodiversity, enhanced their understanding of why biodiversity is important to us, and expressed through stories, artwork, and presentations, why we should care about biodiversity.
