Big Idea 17: Interdependence

Type: Educational Game

Students will test the solubility of different items used in packing. Based on their observations, the student will explain which of the materials would be least harmful to the environment. The task assesses students' ability to make simple observations and make generalized inferences from their observations

Type: Formative Assessment

NASA Aqua Satellite image, captured on April 25, 2010, of an oil slick caused by the April 20, 2010 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.

Type: Image/Photograph

Students explore the problem of marine debris and microplastics as well as the ways that citizens and the government can help, then create their own public service announcement or educational short video in this integrated lesson plan.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students discover how marine debris gets into the oceans and some of the problems it causes, then analyze the abundance of waterways within the state of Florida that contribute to the marine debris issue. They will explore the problem of marine debris and ways that citizens can work alongside government to reduce the impact of plastic pollution in this integrated lesson plan.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students explore the problem of marine debris and ways that citizens can work alongside government to reduce the impact of plastic pollution.  They calculate their plastic footprint by estimating the number of common single-use plastics they use in one year, then calculate how much plastic waste could be eliminated by cutting down on their use of single-use plastics in this integrated lesson plan.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn ways to help keep the ocean clean by recycling and write letters to lobby government officials to support recycling programs. They will decide which materials are most important to recycle by looking at several characteristics of the materials including whether they are renewable or nonrenewable, if the material will decompose, and the amount of the materials currently being recycled in this MEA.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations.  Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn about a Florida keystone species, the gopher tortoise, and the steps that must be taken to safely excavate and relocate gopher tortoises found on development sites based on Florida laws.  Students will explore how citizens work with local and state government organizations, such as the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to solve problems in this model eliciting activity.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations.  Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this Model Eliciting Activity (MEA), students will help a volunteer coordinator choose cleanup projects that will have the greatest positive impact on the environment. Students will learn about how litter and pollution can affect wildlife as well as how cleanup efforts can help. They will discuss the importance of volunteering in the community and utilize math skills such as calculating area in deciding how to rank the different cleanup projects.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

 This lesson covers:

• The natural history, biology, and ecology of humpback whales
• The internal and external anatomy of humpback whales
• Threats to humpback whales and how scientists work to protect them

Type: Lesson Plan

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be able to explain the purpose and path of a food chain is, describe a simple Everglades food chain and trace the flow of energy from the sun as it is transferred. Students will also be able to explain the impacts of a loss of a species in a food chain. 

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be able to explain the threats to animals in certain Everglades habitats and why they are threatened or endangered. 

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be able to define the terms threatened, endangered, and extinct and analyze the impact of humans and other living things as a result of human, social, economic, and political activities. Students will also be able to name three endangered species living in the Everglades. 

Type: Lesson Plan

In this STEM lesson, students will build a food chain with Florida organisms and keep the energy "point level" within a desired range.  There will then be some scenarios that will be placed on the food chain and student engineers will try to keep their food chain in tact.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will conduct a close reading of an informational article about pythons in the Everglades. Students will use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of selected academic words in context, and they will sort selected tier 3 words into categories and examine the relationships between words in a category. Students will also answer text-dependent questions about the article and identify and describe the cause/effect structure used throughout the article. Students will complete an informational paragraph about the events that are occurring in the Everglades using text evidence to support their ideas. Graphic organizers, answer keys, and a writing rubric have been provided with the lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will conduct a close reading of an informational article about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Students will use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of selected academic words in context, and they will sort selected tier 3 words into categories and examine the relationships between words in a category. Students will also answer text-dependent questions about the article and identify and describe the cause/effect structure used throughout the article. Students will write an informational paragraph about the events that are occurring in the Amazon rain forest. Graphic organizers, answer keys, and a writing rubric have been provided with the lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

This MEA will ask students to work in teams to help their client, The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to decide which Burmese python traps manufacturing company to buy traps from. The traps will be placed along the Florida Keys and the Everglades to help prevent the growth of invasive Burmese Python population. The students will implement their knowledge of how plants, animals, and humans impact the environment, use mathematical and analytical problem-solving strategies, and be able report their finding in an organized, descriptive manner.

Type: Lesson Plan

What an exciting opportunity for the students to learn and become a productive individual in their community, by learning and understanding that each and everyone plays a huge part in protecting the environment. This project will instill a lifetime commitment to developing values that lead to protecting our wild life. The MEA is a realistic, real life experience that could be translated into everyday experiences.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will create an aquifer in a cup and model how groundwater can become contaminated.

Type: Lesson Plan

Learn about the effects of a changing climate on the Arctic ecosystem and four of its well-known mammals: the polar bear, the walrus, the Arctic fox and the beluga whale.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA) is written on a 4^th grade level. In this open-ended problem, the Biological Nature Preserve MEA provides students with an engineering problem where they must work as a team to analyze data to choose the best tree to plant in the serenity garden. The students will consider the cost, shade, height, leaf color, maintenance, and growth rate to choose the best tree that not only will benefit the environment but also this nature preserve. The students will work in teams to decide on a process of how to rank these trees from "best to worst" as well as explain how they arrived at their solution using a letter format.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will learn how humans are impacting the environment by reading various informational texts on the topic of saving the rain forests. Students will determine the meanings of unknown content-specific words and identify the main idea and supporting details within the text. They will write a summary of the text and respond to a prompt by writing an opinion essay.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this MEA the Parent-Teacher Group asks the students to help them plan a fun yet environmentally friendly end-of-the-year party.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will explore the structure of plants in ways never before. Through observations about plant parts related to everyday food, students will gain a further understanding of humans and plants being interdependent. This lesson integrates Science, Reading, Writing and even some Math practices if choosing to complete the extension activities.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students explore the impact plants, animals, and humans are having on the environment - especially native plants and animals. This lesson has some interesting hands-on investigations to help students visualize the impact pollution is having on habitats. For the final project, students use their research to create a class book informing others about plants and animals that are endangered. Students also share ways people can help!

This lesson includes reading and writing activities that could be integrated into daily reading and language arts time blocks.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson studies the emerging science of using glow technology (phosphorescence and fluorescence) to improve the well-being of living things. Students will be introduced to the Glow Kitten and other animals that are naturally bioluminescent or have been modified by human impact. Then students will take part in their own investigation and create a glowing carnation while considering ways this technology can be used in their own lives. Along the way, students will research books, articles, and websites and use journal entries to record their learning. Finally, students will create their own advertisement highlighting their glowing carnation and its amazing uses!

Type: Lesson Plan

Fourth graders will help Cookies and Treats find cost-effective and eco-friendly packaging for its cookies. Students will organize data and compare prices using decimal notation in order to develop a procedure for choosing packaging for cookies.  Students will use multiplication and division of whole numbers to plan for how many packages to order.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

This fun lesson gives students the chance to "act out" food chains. By really putting themselves into food chains, students will better understand the transfer of energy through the food chain, as well as understand that the sun is the primary source of energy in a food chain. This lesson ends with students constructing their own food chains, and writing an explanatory paragraph to explain the flow of energy through the food chain they constructed.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) is written at a 4th grade level. The Pollinator MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best pollinator for certain situations.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson the students will learn about a predator/prey relationship. They will learn about the role that plants and animals play in their ecosystem and what each role is called. The students will also learn about the limiting factors each ecosystem possesses that prevent any species population from becoming too large.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this activity about food webs, students learn that producers make all of the molecules they need from simple substances and energy from the sun, other living things depend on producers for food, and living things that must eat other organisms as food are known as consumers. Food webs show all of the various interactions among producers and consumers in an ecosystem. Following an introduction to the content, students are divided into six groups and given a set of six cards, each of which represents a producer or consumer, unique to one of six different ecosystems. From the set of cards, students identify the producers and consumers, discuss who might eat whom, and construct an illustration of the possible food web configurations.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed to use Internet resources to explore the side effects of technology; to design, implement and evaluate solutions related to the problem of waste disposal.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson shows students how important renewable resources are for our society & the world of living things. Trees, fresh water, and clean air support the majority of life on Earth; because of this, we must protect these and other critical natural resources from exploitation and pollution. One approach to this is conservation, the practice of ensuring that our natural resources will always be available to future generations. Class discussion and activities will help broaden students' understanding about some important conservation activities: recycling and composting.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students identify and talk about biodiversity and what they know about the various habitats and life around them. Using online resources, they identify the basic components necessary for biodiversity, the critical and countless benefits of habitats, as well as the serious present and future threats to their ongoing existence. Classification and characteristics is part of this lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students have an opportunity to discover how man affects the environment through pollution.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed for students to investigate familiar and unfamiliar ecosystems using Internet resources, to explore how various organisms satisfy their needs within their environments, and to study the kinds of relationships that exist between organisms within an environment.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn about recycling renewable and nonrenewable resources while completing a model eliciting activity in which they help Sunshine School District to decide which material to start their recycling program with.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Explore some facts about climate change and how it impacts our world in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore the seasons and how plants and animals adapt to the changing environment in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore food chains found in many Florida ecosystems as you complete this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore some non-native animals in Florida including the honeybee, Cuban tree frog, and lionfish in this interactive tutorial.

Click the link to open .

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore some native animals of Florida including the Florida panther, gopher tortoise, and American alligator in this interactive tutorial.

Click the link to open .

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore non-native plants of Florida, including orange trees, sugarcane, and Brazilian Peppertree in this interactive tutorial.

Click the link to open .

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore some native plants of Florida including bald cypress, longleaf pine and prickly pear in this interactive tutorial.

Click the link to open .

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore energy flow in the environment through food chains as you complete this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore the path energy takes from the Sun to producers to consumers.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Calorie-dense foods can power the human body across the ocean? Feel the burn.

Related Resources:
KROS Pacific Ocean Kayak Journey: GPS Data Set[.XLSX]
KROS Pacific Ocean Kayak Journey: Path Visualization for Google Earth[.KML]

Download the CPALMS Perspectives video student note taking guide.

Type: Perspectives Video: Professional/Enthusiast

In this project students will research a mountain ecosystem. They will create a presentation of their ecosystem that includes information on animals and vegetation, which will also demonstrate the flow of energy through the ecosystem. Students will interpret and analyze the data to hypothesize what would happen if a species was removed or added to the flow of energy. To finalize, students will write an explanatory piece that describes the possible changes that would take place if an animal was removed from an ecosystem and how that would affect the food chain.

Type: Project

In this food science activity, learners observe different plant-originated foods. This activity will help learners understand that consumers (including humans) rely on producers, specifically plants and plant parts, for food. This lesson guide includes background information and variation ideas.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students will explore the advantages and disadvantages of different fishing techniques.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students simulate fishing techniques and explore processes that result in bycatch. They visually express their catch in the form of a graph at the end of the activity.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students begin by reading Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" as an example of how overdevelopment can cause long-lasting environmental destruction. Students discuss how to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of human industry.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, students will learn how the destruction of a coral reef affects the animals that live there.

Type: Teaching Idea

As a result of this activity, students will be able to recognize how living organisms change their environments and how these changes affect other organisms.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will distinguish, from a list of consumer products, which products are environmentally friendly to purchase.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will take a hypothetical environmental situation and research appropriate literature to determine factual information and logicially argue a particular point of view.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, students make connections among penguins and other antarctic animals. They will trace the flow of energy in food chains and webs.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will classify trash components and select appropriate ways of recycling.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will discover the food energy relationship within a food web in a coral reef habitat.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will learn how animals are interconnected with the arctic ecosystem and how humans impact these interrelationships.

Type: Teaching Idea

This resource is a simulation game where students represent plants and animals living in a forest habitat. Sitting in a circle, they connect themselves using string to represent the ways they depend on each other. As they make connections, the string forms a web of life. They will also learn what occurs when an invasive species enters their environment.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will understand the importance of wetland plants in early medicine and for other uses.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will discuss and determine wildlife rescue scenarios based on cards with situations.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this activity, the students will design a protected environment for an endangered animal that encourages the animal's natural behaviors and meets its physical requirements. Students will explain to their classmates why the protected environment is essential for the endangered animal.

Type: Teaching Idea

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This National Geographic Kids article explains how the invasion of non-native plants is threatening native food webs.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article describes how energy passes through food chains. Examples of each link in the chain and a description of its role in the food chain are given.

Type: Text Resource

Florida Division of Forestry – This website provides identifications, descriptions, and biological classifications of Florida trees. The website is presented in field-guide format, providing sketches of elements such as the leaves, fruit, and flowers. Also, the trees included are grouped alphabetically.

Type: Text Resource

This resource provides information on some of Florida's non-native invasive fauna. The resource includes a list, description, and prevention guide for non-native invasive plant species in Florida.

Type: Text Resource

In this lesson tied to academic standards for English/Language Arts, students receive support as they read a complex informational text about honeybees. The teacher facilitates a close reading and writing a response-to-text.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

In this series of 10 investigations, students gain experience with the evidence of chemical change - production of a gas, change in temperature, color change, and formation of a precipitate. Students begin by observing that similar-looking powders can be differentiated by the way they react chemically with certain test liquids. Students then use their chemical tests and observations to identify an unknown powder and, in a follow-up activity, to identify the active ingredients in baking powder. Students continue to explore chemical change by using a thermometer to observe that temperature either increases or decreases during chemical reactions. Then they control these reactions by adjusting the amount of reactants. In another set of activities, students use the color changes of red cabbage indicator to classify substances as acids or bases, neutralize solutions, and compare the relative acidity of two different solutions. Students conclude the investigation by comparing a precipitate to one of the reactants that formed it. Students see that a new substance was created during the chemical reaction. Information and questions about photosynthesis and cellular respiration are included as examples of chemical changes on pages 316-318 of this resource.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

In this lesson students will learn about pollution and its effects. They will learn in depth about pesticides and see its harmful effects that they might not have realized at first. The students will simulate a landfill and see what objects will decompose and which objects won't. They will create their own solutions to an oil spill and test to see which solution is the most effective. The students will observe the effects oil has on water birds. Through this they will determine the long term damage done by an oil spill.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

The beaver is often referred to as nature's own engineer. This video segment focuses on the beaver's ability to transform its environment to suit itself. The beaver does so with an innate ability to construct dams -- a feat no creature, save humans, is able to achieve.

Type: Video/Audio/Animation