Biomes Activity by Chris Ollig
During our fantastic camping chair conversations at this springs kabt field trip several people shared some wonderful ideas for lessons they have developed or used in their classroom. I had a few individuals inquire about an activity I developed to help students learn about the various biomes.
As is usually the case, a winter collaboration with fellow bvn biology teachers helped spark an idea. We were discussing ways to avoid the usual mundane exercise of teaching students “facts” about various biological thingamajigs. I have struggled for a while with how much it pained me to teach students about how many inches of rain a particular biome received annually so that seemed like the best topic to start on.
My general philosophy is that teaching students how to gather information about a topic is more beneficial than spoon feeding them the information. Further, I feel that having students inquire about just one topic (i.e. rainforest biome) rather than every topic will allow them to better grasp the idea of what exactly the concept is. That is certainly more valuable than knowing how much rainfall EACH biome receives annually etc. Second, I would say that giving the students purpose in their learning and perhaps even stoking a little competition does wonders for building student engagement.
That brings me to this lesson. I attempted to develop a way to encourage students to investigate one particular biome, and what better motivation than their VERY SURVIVAL! Admittedly I have a guilty pleasure…Naked and Afraid. So this activity plays with the idea that students are dropped off in a particular biome and asked to survive by researching various biotic and abiotic factors found in their environment. The more thorough their investigation, the longer they survive. Granted, a bunch of naked high school students running around the rainforest is probably not something the district would condone, so I changed the name to…wait for it…Mostly Clothed But Still A Little Afraid.
This spring was my first attempt at this activity, and yes I did discover several aspects that could use some tweeking, but my overall impression was that the students genuinely loved it. They were excited to dig into their biome and see what they could come up with. After the assignment was completed I averaged the “days survived” for each group and had a dramatic reveal of the winning groups. Interestingly, the biomes I thought would be the easiest to survive scored the lowest. I think that across the board, the dessert biome scored the highest. Go figure.
Anyways, here is the full document. Use what you like, modify for your tastes.
Biome Survival Project STUDENT HANDOUT
Biome Survival Project TEACHER INFO
Chris Ollig, Blue Valley North High School
