My Science Box

Assessment

1. Have students summarize the theory they came up with in their own words.
2. Provide another example of population change data and have students, individually or in groups, graph the information, interpret the data, and create a theory. For example, see the Coho Salmon Graphing worksheet (downloadable below).

Going Further

1. The JASON project, provides a year long, interdisciplinary curriculum linked to real world scientific expeditions. They created a superb series of lessons about the Channel Islands in California called “From Shore to Sea”. Story 4 of the curriculum deals with kelp forest monitoring and has students graph information about the population density of sea urchins and of kelp plants. They discover a relationship between kelp and sea urchins as well as El Nino events.
2. The Project WILD K-12 Curriculum and Activity Guide has several great population change activities. My favorites are the “How many bears can live in this forest?” and the “Oh deer!” activities. Both are outdoor games that illustrate the idea of population change, limiting factors, carrying capacity and can be used to graph population changes over time.
3. A similar game was developed to look at wolf populations by a group of teachers through the Columbia Education Center's Summer Workshop.
4. The United Nations recently developed a set of 8 Millenium Goals that were set by UN leaders to combat extreme poverty. Much of this debate centers on the growing human population of the planet and the simultaneously diminishing environmental resources. A great layperson’s discussion of the debate can be found in a recent edition of Scientific American, September 2005. Global population data can be found at the Global Population Database. The Population Resource Bureau has a list of lesson plans for teachers related to global population statistics.
5. Although written for grades 9-12, this lesson plan by the Sierra Club on California’s sequoia forests gets into really interesting issues of population control and forest management.