Biome Bottles, Ecosystem Learning... and Nine-Year-Olds

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 It's beginning to feel like Spring in Pennsylvania,  and with it comes our state tests and just beyond...my favorite teaching of the ENTIRE year...ecosystems and biomes.  I just LOVE nature and last year I jumped our third graders in with both feet and we made a huge mess in my room for two days and assembled fully self-contained terrestrial and aquatic biome bottles. 

This project has allowed me to connect so many things I love--big projects, my aquarium past, kids, parents, plants and photography. 

Parents from both classes of our third graders helped greatly and we got lots of donor support from aquarium plants to cherry shrimp and snails.  Coca-Cola donated 150 new 2L bottles and an awesome mom and dad team cut three per child exactly so, to assemble into what you see below.
To do this project you 'll need:

 -3 clean 2-L soda bottles, caps removed
- clean garden stone (about 2C per bottle)
 -potting soil (garden soil, no vermiculite...about
        1-1.5 C per bottle)
-sand (about 1/4 C per bottle)
-a handful of composted leaves and a stick or  
         two
- a sprinkling of grass seed (we added a few
         alyssum flower seeds for fun)
- an oxygenating aquatic plant (anacharis,
         cabomba, hygrophilia, hornwort, ludwigia
          are a few)
- THE CRITTERS:  for the terrarium: an earthworm, a few sowbugs, and a cricket
                                                                                          for the aquarium:  a snail and a cherry shrimp
NOTE: We lost many of the cherry shrimp, either because sitting on the windowsill in April is too cold, or because the nitrate load in the small amount of water is too great for shrimp.  There are no fish that are strict herbivores so I didn't want to use them.  I don't like killing animals so this year we're going to try gammarus or scuds.  They are amphipods and are much smaller, but they eat algae and I think will stand a better chance of the students understanding the balance of small ecosystem animal/plant relations well enough with this much excitement going on in their worlds.

 I make a big deal of our learning and connecting.  I ask a lot of my third graders.  They learn all about ecosystems.

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Vocabulary: producers, primary, secondary and tertiary consumers, energy source, decomposers, food web, food chain....biomes, biotic and abiotic members of their biome, ecosystem, habitat.

Student pairs create a food chain mobile of local animals and plants as an assessment.

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We go on a culminating field trip to a local Environmental Center where students participate in a stream study. They wade into the stream to collect macroinvertebrates then analyze them to see which species they have, using a guide that helps them determine health of the water for animals/plants living in the riparian zone nearest the river...and as a result the health of the watershed area.

I'd be glad to share food web, producer/consumer/decomposer worksheets, a math project and anything else with you if you comment below and include your email.