Ecology Intro Activity

For N.E.W.'s science class, we will be learning the subject of ecology. Ecology is the study of ecosystems, or how living and non-living things interact in their environment. To introduce the topic, we had an activity where we had to get in groups of 11-12 people. One of the people was the leader, while all the rest had labels that had biotic and abiotic factors. A factor that is biotic is something living while a factor that is abiotic is not. Both biotic and abiotic things have to interact in an environment to create an ecosystem.

The leader had to connect all of the biotic and abiotic factors together with yarn, red yarn representing consumers (organisms that eat other organisms) and green representing producers (organisms that produce their own energy). If two organisms were connected, the one with red yarn eats the one holding onto the green end. This led to us making a food web, with water in the middle since all organisms need water. All of the organisms were connected in a variety of ways since some that ate others were eaten by something else.

Once everything was connected, we added vocabulary words from our word bank to our labels. For example, a monkey is not only a monkey but prey, a predator, consumer and a biotic factor. This activity helped us understand what ecology is by teaching us the vocabulary and basic connections between animals, plants, fungi and abiotic things in their environment.