Education Standards
Schoolyard Habitat Comparison
Overview
This document provides a simplified version of an investigation that uses quadrats to compare habitats in your schoolyard. Depending on your focus, the activity can be adapted to compare the diversity or amount of ground insects, invertebrates or plants in two areas. Students use the Next Generation Science Standards’ Planning and Carrying Out Investigations practice and the Cause and Effect and/or Stability and Change crosscutting concepts to build understanding of the needs of animals, differences in ecosystems and/or change in ecosystems.
Decide on Context for the Activity: After reading through the lesson and NGSS section consider:
- What is the Performance Expectation or Disciplinary Core Idea that this activity is going to be helping students to understand? This activity works well for comparing terrestrial habitats, looking at changes in habitat over time, and comparing areas with different amounts of human impact.
- What might the students be looking for as they search inside their quadrats in different habitats? Are they focused on insects, invertebrates or plants? Will the students be counting total numbers or biodiversity?
Biodiversity looks at the variety of different species and is more complicated to measure as it requires student capacity in telling species apart and tracking which ones they have seen.
- How are you going to set up your students for this investigation, so it is helping them to explain a phenomenon? Can you provide them an opportunity to create a question about the phenomenon that this investigation will help them understand? For example, an investigation question might be, “What is the effect of location (grass or sheltered) on the number of ground invertebrates living there?”or “Where do more bugs live?”
Creating student ownership of the process with a “storyline” approach helps create buy in for students who are not typically as engaged with science. IslandWood’s Phenomenal Observations activity can be a good way to generate student questions.
Teacher Walk-About: Consider the following questions as you walk your schoolyard:
- What are two habitats your students could compare using this activity? Each habitat type should provide at least some shelter and food for insects (grass that isn’t played on, garden beds, mulch, and edges of nature trails work well but not woodchips around play equipment, soccer fields and asphalt).
- What are the areas you could establish as boundaries for when your students will be placing their quadrats? Each area needs enough space to place at least 6 quadrats spread out from each other.
- What distractions could be a concern? (e.g. recess times and play equipment)
- What safety concerns will you need to address? (e.g. adjacent to traffic, steep slope)
- How much time do you need to plan to get to and from the site?
Decide on Process: There are a variety of options for how you approach this investigation with your students (depending on their age, grade level and experience with the Science and Engineering Practices).
- Will students to develop their own investigation procedure or do you want to provide them an already designed investigation to use?
- Do you want students to write their observations individually, or should one person record the data for the group?