We began the week with a brief review of what to expect on the quiz scheduled for this Friday.  Class notes are shown below:

This week, students will work in groups of three students each to create a poster representing biogeochemical cycling.  For the project, students will create a poster to model the water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycles on a poster with an emphasis on including the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park where possible.  Students will have access to the class textbook and the class set of laptops to conduct their research.  Students will also receive the Nutrient Cycling POGIL worksheet packet that will provide them with additional information about the process of carbon (C), water (H and O), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) cycling.  Sulfur is often included as a component of the biogeochemical cycle, frequently appreviated as the CHNOPS cycle.  To help keep student projects moving forward, a variety of resources will be posted here for review.

Crash Course: Carbon and Water Cycles

Crash Course: Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycles

Bozeman Science: Biogeochemical Cycles (includes the Sulfur Cycle)

The Global Carbon Cycle – a website with data about global carbon cycling with actual numbers that need to be added to the student posters.

Water Cycle – USGS website providing a robust review of hydrologic (water) cycle vocabulary, a presentation of the cycle itself, and data students will need to add the actual amount of water stored in various locations on Earth.

Texas A&M University has a website with pages devoted to explaining the Nitrogen Cycle.  Additional in-depth information about the Nitrogen Cycle is available on the Nature Education Knowledge Project website.

Phosphorus Cycle – information about the cycle and a nice graphic from the Shmoop University website.

Sulfur Cycle – a presentation provided by The Environmental Literacy Council

Example poster

For our abbreviated Friday class period, students were assigned to read pages 656-661 from the BSCS biology textbook and to complete the following:

• Summarize the main ideas
• Define the vocabulary words (in bold) and provide context for each word (an example of what the word means in relation to what the reading is about)
• Answer Part B, questions 3a-c, on page 647

After several days of research and reading, we lightened the mood with the Food Web Game.  Students teamed up into groups of three, with each team receiving a container of rice.  The rice represented seeds, which comprised the base of our food chain.  One member of the team counted out 10 grains of rice and handed them to the runner who traded them in for one lentil.  The recorder wrote a tally mark to indicate they had received a lentil on a note card.  When the team reached 10 lentils, they traded those in for one white bean (representing a red fox).  The game ended when the first team was able to trade in 10 white beans for one black bean and then all members of the team had to howl like a wolf.  The game helped represent the energy it takes to sustain a single tertiary consumer, with energy loss represented by the energy students spent running back and forth during the activity.

We continued our study of the ecosystem of Yellowstone by introducing the concept of trophic levels.  We worked through the Trophic Pyramid PowerPoint slide deck, emphasizing the vocabulary of producers and consumers, herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores.  We took the population mass data from yesterday (see below) and began making sense of the data on the What are Trophic Pyramid handout (see below), the food webs students have been constructing, and our new understanding of trophic levels to construct a Yellowstone Trophic Pyramid.