This instructional video introduces students to ecosystems, disruptions to ecosystems, biodiversity, and the concept of resiliency, providing a number of specific examples.
The first 4 minutes and 29 seconds are suitable for upper elementary and higher students to watch and the last segment provides teaching tips for all grade levels.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The first part of this video is a great introduction to ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural selection.
The content is brief and easy-to-understand, with engaging images to complement the narrative.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the terms ecosystem, population, species, invasive, and adaptation.
Stopping the video at 4 minutes and 29 seconds is suggested for student viewing.
Differentiation
Cross-curricular connections could be made with geography, social studies, and economics classes when discussing the differing natural resources available in different parts of the world and how reliant people are on the ecosystem services and resources (such as regulating the water cycle, filtering water, food, wood, etc.) provided in their area.
The topic of ecosystems can connect to lessons about sustainability, development, natural resource management, and a circular economy that does not require perpetual growth.
The resource explores the dynamics in ecosystem change, life forms interactions, stability, disruptions of biodiversity in a changing climate. There is no misconception in the resource and it is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
MS-LS2-4 Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
MS-LS2-5 Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
HS-LS2-7 Design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.
LS4: Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
3-LS4-3 Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
3-LS4-4 Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
