Class 10
Goals today are to make sure all students remember and understand the molecular basis of photosynthesis and respiration, and how Sunlight is the power behind life on Earth, with ecosystems capturing and distributing it.
These ideas will then inform the examination of living ecosystems in the classroom (brine shrimp aquaria), and the students' designing of simple experiments to test some of the ideas.
Materials
- Aquaria, new & old
- Molecule models & paper slips
- "Drama reviews" from last week
- Observation sheets for previous week
- TV, camera, slide show
- Bromthymol blue
Activities
- Review "drama review/quiz" as script for their molecule practice
- I do brief pantomime version of last week's play
- Distribute molecule models for kids to do same pantomimes with each other, rotating plant/animal roles in groups of 2
- Review fill-in-the-blanks observation guide for shrimpwatch through week
- Distribute aquaria, emphasize relation to "cartoon" and play - what will the shrimp need to survive?
- "Slide show" with brine shrimp life cycle; have them draw what they see
- TV "slide show" of pictures students made two weeks ago, and description of how these can be used as "frames" of Web version of "cartoon"
- (If time) demo & setup of week-long experiments w bromthymol for detection of CO2
Wrap-up: our aquaria are sealed, with no new atoms coming in. All processes use the same atoms over and over. Two very important processes are the reverse of each other, and together form an endless cycle. This can only happen if something new does keep coming in from outside - not atoms, but ENERGY, from the Sun.