Nature’s Recyclers
While meeting live detritivores and scavengers, your students will learn the important role that decomposition plays in our everyday lives. Meeting these underappreciated recyclers will prove to be an experience that you and your students will not forget.
Experience live, interactive programs right in your classroom! Our educators use videoconferencing technology to share science, nature and math activities with your students, engaging them in a dynamic, hands-on learning experience.
Cost: $175
To Register: We book our Distance Learning programs through the Center for Interactive Learning & Collaboration (CILC). Book your program, today!
We provide:
A kit with materials for interactive experiments for 30 students.
A Teacher’s Guide to prepare you, your classroom, and your students before the experience.
Extension activities and resources for further exploration.
Grade Level: 3-5
Duration: 50 minutes
Group Size: 30 students
Set up: You can use H.323 videoconferencing system or a computer with Zoom, a webcam, speakers, and microphone.
Next Generation Science Standards:
Students participating in this program will explore science content as stated in the Disciplinary Core Ideas. They will engage in science and engineering practices as they ask questions, use models, and engage in arguments from evidence about decomposers, detritovores, and scavengers.
LS1.A: Structures and Functions
Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction.
LS1.C: Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms
All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Plants need water and light to live and grow.
Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth and the energy they need to maintain body warmth and for motion.
LS2.A: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems
The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Some organisms, such as fungi and bacteria, break down dead organisms (both plants or plants parts and animals) and therefore operate as “decomposers.” Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life. Newly introduced species can damage the balance of an ecosystem.
Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.
LS4.C: Adaptation
For any particular environment, some kinds of organisms survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
PS3.D: Energy in Chemical Processes and Everyday Life
The energy released [from] food was once energy from the sun that was captured by plants in the chemical process that forms plant matter (from air and water).