Project+3+Plan

= Project Plan: Phase 3 =

General Topic: ** Science ** Specific Topic: ** Food chains ** Audience: ** Sixth grade students ** Activity: ** Concept mapping key information **

Topic Overview
Food chains exist in every ecosystem, biome, and habitat all over the world, even in your back yard. Food chains are both necessary and delicate parts of the world around us. As the top of the food chain, knowing more about food chains can make us all better stewards of the planet Earth. A food chain is a simplified extraction of a food web in which energy is transferred from one organism to another as each higher level in a food chain ingests or eats lower organisms along the chain for survival. Prior knowledge for being able to understand food chains would include knowledge of Earth's original energy source, the sun, and how this energy is converted into a tangible form for Earth's organisms to utilize this energy (photosynthesis).

Task (what will your audience be doing)
Each student will log onto a concept mapping website, either from a given list or one they find on their own, and generate a concept map outlining the major information of this unit. The concept map can be based on the vocabulary, or a series of food chains. If they choose to do food chains, each level in the food chain must be labeled as producer or consumer, consumer level, and the type of consumer; herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, or scavenger.

** Process/ Guidance (how you will create the project) ** The students will download one of these mind mapping tools to generate their concept map, save it, and post it to our class blog.
 * Mindmeister: @http://www.mindmeister.com/
 * Freemind: @http://freemind.en.softonic.com/
 * xmind: @http://www.xmind.net/

Evaluation (how will you evaluate your audience)
Student work will be evaluated on the clarity and accuracy of your examples that you state within your concept maps. The student's ability to accurately generate plausible food chains, or organize acquired information from this lesson will determine their grade of a 4, 3, 2, or 1.
 * 4 - Superior work [no grammatical errors, all information is clear and accurate]
 * 3 - Good work [1 or 2 grammatical errors, most information is clear and accurate]
 * 2 - Fair work [2 or more grammatical errors, information presentation is not organized as well as it could be]
 * 1 - Not your best effort [grammar errors, unclear organization, and inaccurate information presented]

Reflection (why did you choose to create this project)
I like this activity because it will give each student the ability to be an individual. Each student has the freedom to choose what part of the lesson they enjoyed learning about, and display to the class how they see it. The best thing about graphic organizers, is that no two need to look alike.