Ecosystems & Changes - Teacher Manual (3rd grade) SKU: 469

During this Unit, students will specifically focus on the concept of ecosystems and the changes made by organisms to survive in them. Through experiments aimed at modeling food chains and food webs, students will begin to understand how a disturbance in one segment of an ecosystem can affect other, if not all, segments of that system. Students will come to appreciate that plants and animals in ecosystems are directly and indirectly affected by non-living components of the system, such as soil, precipitation, and temperature. By performing experiments, they will see that certain adaptations are required for plants and animals to survive in one ecosystem versus another. The concept of adaptation is further developed in experiments in which students will find that specific body structures can provide one species with a survival advantage over other species. In these same experiments, students will see that over long periods of time the environment in which organisms live may change and th