Rainforest Ecosystem Unit

For this week, we had to create a week-long unit lesson plan addressing 2 GLCE's and 2 METS for a particular grade level. I chose to create my ecosystem/food web lesson plan for 4th grade science, since I hope to teach 4th grade someday. The benchmarks that this unit addresses are:

(GLCE) SCIENCE Benchmarks:
L.EC.04.11: Identify organisms as part of a food chain or food web.
L.EC.04.21: Explain how environmental changes can produce a change in the food web.

(MET) TECHNOLOGY Benchmarks:
Technology Research Tools 1: Use Web search engines and built-in search functions of other various resources to locate information.
Technology Research Tools 2: Describe basic guidelines for determining the validity of information accessed from various sources.

Here is the science schedule for this unit: (created by Google Calendar)


This public calendar can let students and parents know what is going on for the week in the classroom. If this were a real classroom, I would add all the other subjects onto the calendar as well. Since science is only approximately 1 hr per day, that is why the calendar seems so empty.

To create this lesson plan, I found some useful websites and tagged them using my del.icio.us account. I tagged all of the websites for this unit as "food web." Some of the websites that were specifically aimed at the rainforest food webs, I tagged "rainforest food web."

The first website I found was a website with general information on rainforests and also listed some rainforest animals. This website is helpful because on Monday, I will introduce what a rainforest is, where it is found, the climate, and what types of animals are found there. This will give students some valuable background information about this biome.

The bulk of the information and lecture will be on Tuesday. The rest of the week, students will be working on a mini-project. On Tuesday, I will focus on some important vocabulary words such as producer, consumer, decomposer, herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore. The second website I found gave an example of a rainforest food chain, broken down by what type they were (producer, consumer, etc). The next website thoroughly explains each of these new vocabulary words as well as the Food Chain and Webs website. This gave me some background information to better teach these vocab words. After this introductory lesson on food webs, students will create their own using the Gould League website. This will better prepare students for when we create our own rainforest food web in the classroom.

On Wednesday, students will be assigned a different rainforest animal and be required to research it using the Internet. They will be required to find out information such as what it looks like, what it eats, etc. and create a mini-report on their animal. This is where the technology benchmarks fit in. Students will have to use search engines and the websites I bookmarks on del.icio.us to find valuable information. Before they do this, we will have a quick discussion as to what makes a good source, so that students can make informed decisions on the validity of the information they find. Students will be required to create a colored drawing of their assigned animal. They will use the Internet to find pictures to see what it looks like.

On Thursday, students will give a 5 minute presentation on their assigned animal and tell the class where their animal will fit in on the classroom food web. The food web will be created on the wall of the classroom. We will draw in the arrows as a class to show which way energy flows.

On Friday, I will read them a book that talks about rainforest food chains and the affect things such as logging have on the ecosystem. We will have a discussion on how logging affects the rainforest food web. The last website I found is an article describing the effects of human activities on the rainforest ecosystem and its animals, thus alterating its food webs.