Without the work of decomposers, living organisms would eventually use up all the raw materials in the environment, and dead organisms and wastes would pile up. This video segment from Interactive NOVA: "Earth" describes the role of decomposers as the earth's great recyclers.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Farming ants might sound like a crazy thing to do unless you might like to eat chocolate covered ants. It turns out we can learn a lot from ants and the best way is to build your own ant farm.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Lesson Plan
Learn about bees, their habitat and how to interact with a swarm in this Wild TV video segment.
Material Type: Lecture
An interview with biologist Gro Amdam, one of the members of the group that brought us the bee genome. Hey just what is a genome and could bees hold the answer to aging? In this show we learn the answers to these questions and why researchers are buzzing around bees.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Lesson Plan
In this video segment from WILD TV, learn about bees and the different techniques for handling them.
Material Type: Lecture
Imagine being the size of an ant. Be careful - a face-to-face encounter with an ant would be scary and potentially life-threatening! But, if you avoided being eaten, you could learn a lot about ant anatomy from a close-up view. Ants have many body parts that are normally hard to see without a magnifying glass or microscope. And each structure has its own special function.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
The study of biomimicry and sustainable design promises great benefits in design applications, offering cost-effective, resourceful, non-polluting avenues for new enterprise. An important final caveat for students to understand is that once copied, species are not expendable. Biomimicry is intended to help people by identifying natural functions from which to pattern human-driven services. Biomimicry was never intended to replace species. Ecosystems remain in critical need of ongoing protection and biodiversity must be preserved for the overall health of the planet. This activity addresses the negative ramifications of species decline. For example, pollinators such as bees are a vital work force in agriculture. They perform an irreplaceable task in ensuring the harvest of most fruit and vegetable crops. In the face of the unexplained colony collapse disorder, we are only now beginning to understand how invaluable these insects are in keeping food costs down and even making the existence of these foods possible for humans.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Lesson 1 introduces students to the blow fly's life cycle and the accumulated degree hour (ADH) used by forensic entomologists for estimating the time of death. Lesson 2 introduces Dr. Krinsky's entomological work in solving a murder case in 1986. Students access several primary-source documents related to Dr. Krinsky's entomological work. Both lessons help students expand their understanding of a forensic entomologist's work and appreciate how scientists account for environmental/variable factors in forming a conclusion in a scientific study.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Case Study, Lesson Plan
Students go on a "spider safari" to find spiders around the house, yard, garage, or barn and observe their ways of life, then they return to the classroom to debate the pros and cons of the web-making way of life versus the roaming hunter lifestyle.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Two ants, along with others from their nest, set out to gather crystals for their queen. Initially staying and keeping crystals for themselves, the two ants eventually learn to be happy in their familiar nest.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
This video segment from Between the Lions is an original, animated retelling of the classic Aesops fable in which a grasshopper sings and dances while the ants gather food for winter. The grasshopper then has nothing to eat once the cold weather comes. In the end, the ants invite the grasshopper inside for a meal, and they all dance a merry mambo. Featured "m" words include: many, moons, moody, Murray, Marge, merry, Melanie, mangos, melons, mambo, music, moving, mushrooms, macaroni, managed, milk, Myrtle, mind, middle, month, mountains, melt, meanwhile, munched, moment, make, move, motioned, meatballs, mashed potatoes, magnificent, and meal. This video segment provides a resource for Fluency, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Letter Knowledge Awareness, and Phonological Awareness. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.
Material Type: Lecture
In this problem students are comparing a very small quantity with a very large quantity using the metric system. The metric system is especially convenient when comparing measurements using scientific notations since different units within the system are related by powers of ten.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This task requires students to work with very large and small values expressed both in scientific notation and in decimal notation (standard form). In addition, students need to convert units of mass.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
The following is a lab manual with three different activities to help students become more aware of bee's. The goal of Operation Bee is to educate students about the impact of bees in our everyday lives. Through observation, data collecting, and engineering students will engage in an effort to increase awareness and data available on bees.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
When you spin it around, this toy sounds like a swarm of buzzing bees.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This lesson will help adult learners to identify honey bees, identify different types of honey bees in a hive, describe pollination process, interpret the importance of pollination and honey bees for pollination and gain knowledge about beekeeping. This will provide a business idea for them to pursue at the same type help conserve honey bee populations. In the long run this will help make food production sustainable. Several online and paper resources are available in this lesson.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
