[Mrs. Hartman]

Hi All!
I was checking to see if anyone had any ideas on biomes and ecosystems. I teach 6th grade and want to try and do something fun instead of just reading out of the book, so just checkin to see if anyone had any ideas they could share. TIA!

[Queen of Pink]

Last year I did an ecosystem webquest where they had to pick an animal and tell where it lived and the adaptations it had made. They had to color a map of the world and label the location of their ecosystem. None of the work was done on the computer except research. They had to draw pictures of plants and animals that also lived in that habitat. I believe they had to draw 5 plants, 2 mammals, 2 birds, 2 reptiles/amphibians. The kids really enjoyed learning about the different ecosystems and researching it.

[1956BD]

soda bottle ecosystems.

http://www3.nsta.org/main/news/pdf/tst0009_48.pdf

[starrysky]

diagrams of food chains

divide a paper into little boxes and have them draw and color and name the different biomes

divide a paper in half and choose different water ecosystems to draw and color(partners)

habitat/ecosystem group poster: decorate chart paper and label the different parts of the ecosystem...groups then present posters and they are displayed on the wall....jigsaw so each group gets a different ecosystem

Dioramas: have students get a shoebox...they can make them at home or in class......they came out great when i let them do them at home...but we have also made at school.....they can paint, cover in paper, use stickers, rocks, sand, items from Michaels, foam, plastic animals, grass, cut out magazine pictures....etc to model a Habitat or ecosystem....students can put an animal in the shoebox as well(at school we made them out of clay and painted the animals......but at home they used plastic figurines, animal stickers, or cut out magazine pictures, etc)

Write an animal or ecosystem report with multiple paragraphs....or just have them write a paper on their favorite biome...etc.

[Granola]

http://www.thewildclassroom.com/biomes/grasslands.html

The rest of the site has nice resources also. Watch the video all the way through. It's pretty funny at the very end and my students got a real kick out of it.

[Tulips]

Thanks for sharing this site! It'll be a good resource when we get to the biomes unit in January.

One of the things my kids did last year was to make a poster depicting one of the biomes. THey had to include animals and plant life. They also turned in a short essay describing their biome.

Tulips