Need some ecological relationships activities for your next lesson? I got you.
Have you ever really looked at an ecosystem? Have you ever visited an estuary? What about looking inside of a tree? Have you ever thought about the ecosystem in your own gut?
It is truly amazing how everything, abiotic and biotic, work together to make an ecosystem stable. The relationships are absolutely fascinating!
In this post, I am going to share 5 activities that you can try with your middle school students to immerse them into the world of ecosystems, talk about the ecological relationships meaning, and learn about real-world examples of their occurrence.
First, I will share two activities with you that you can use to introduce your students this topic. Second, I will share a lesson/activity that will guide students through learning about several common relationships they may see in an ecosystem. Finally, I will share two activities that you can do with your students that will help them to widen their knowledge and learn about ecological relationships.
Which ecological relationships activities will you choose?
What are Ecological Relationships? – Introductory Activities
The first step in bringing the WOW factor to your classroom is to help your students to WONDER and help them to become intrinsically motivated to learn more about a topic. In this case, you want them to WANT to learn about ecological relationships!
How do you do that? I have two ecological relationships activities to share with you below to introduce the topic .
Exploring Demodex Mites
Did you know that you have mites that live on your face? Yep, you do! There are two species, Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis.
How do I know? Well, I’ve seen one! I was a part of a citizen science project where we had our students swab their faces for mite DNA. It was pretty cool.
What was also amazing is the way that we got to see these little critters. First, we would put superglue on a microscope slide and then stick the superglued slide to our cheek. Not kidding! Also, this is the adults, NOT the kids…don’t worry!
We’d let the slide sit on our face for a minute and then pull it off and stick in under the microscope! If you were lucky, you’d see one of the mites that were pulled out of your pores!
Unfortunately, I was not lucky enough to ever find one on my face; however, I had some brave colleagues that would come visit the classroom and let me put superglue on their face to find some to show the students. Success!!
If you are brave enough to do this, you can show your students your mites on your face. If not, you can definitely YouTube these critters and show them that way.
So, what does this have to do with ecological relationships? These mites are making a home of the pores on your face. This is an example of a symbiotic relationship. Scientists are still studying the type of relationship it is. There are studies that suggest that they are commensal.
You can have your students brainstorm why they think they would live in our pores.
Pictures of Different Ecological Relationships
Another option to get students hyped up about this topic is to have them to explore pictures of different relationships in an ecosystem.
You can post pictures throughout the room to give students a chance to walk around and look at them. Here are some examples of pictures that you can print:
- sharks and fish
- aquatic organisms in a coral reef
- squirrels in a tree looking for acorns
- fleas on a dog
- ringworms
- termite bacteria
- bees feeding on nectar
- hermit crabs inside a shell
As students are walking around and looking at these pictures, have them to think about these questions:
- How are all of these pictures related?
- Do you see any relationships among organisms in these pictures?
- How are they the same, and how are they different?
After students have had a chance to view these pictures and jot down some notes, discuss the answers as a class.
Now you are ready to dive into the lesson!
Ditch the Ecological Relationships Worksheet with this Lesson/Activity
At this point, your students should be interested in the relationships that organisms can have with each other. So, now it’s time to see how they are in an ecosystem and how this impacts the ecosystem.
What are the relationships in an ecosystem? Where on Earth can ecological relationships be found? You can use a lesson to help answer student questions.
My favorite way to teach a lesson is through an interactive lesson. They are designed to help students remember what they learned by chunking information into digestible pieces. Within the chunks of information, there are questions that students can answers to help them process the information that they just took in.
This particular Organism Interactions in Ecosystems Interactive Lesson explores ecological relationships including predation, coexistence, competition, and symbiotic relationships: parasitism, mutualism, and commensalism. This lesson also covers interdependence, stables ecosystems, and more!
Within the content, there are activities for students to complete such as a KWL, Venn Ddagram, drag-and-drop, exploring an ecological relationships video, and more!
Ecological Relationships Activities to WIDEN Knowledge!
Choose an ecological interactions activity to widen and expand your students knowledge!
Ecosystem Project
This is an opportunity for your students to widen their knowledge, show off their skills, and to deliver creativity.
What is the task?
- Have your students to choose an ecosystem. It can be something you give them a choice of, or they can explore somewhere they are interested in.
- Once they have chosen an ecosystem, they should begin to research the relationships among organisms in the ecosystem.
- They should find at least 3 different examples of ecological relationships of 3 different types of organism interactions that they learned about. For example, they can find a mutualistic relationship, a predator/prey relationship, and a communalistic relationship.
- Once they have completed this research, they must present it to the class. You can have them present in any way that you want whether it be a speech, a poster, a presentation, a song, or whatever you choose or whatever they choose!
This can be a lot of fun! You could extend this and have students use webs to model ecological relationships.
You can find a research project similar to this in the Bright in the Middle Shop or on TPT.
Rabbits and Wolves Simulation
Want to do something quick and a little different?
This simulation helps students to understand how nature balances itself out.
There are different tabs to explore.
- The learner tab is something that the students can read over before beginning the simulation and/or you can go over it with them.
- The activity tab is where students can go through the activity.
- The help tab tells you everything you need to know about the activity.
- The instructor tab will show you where this fits into your lesson plans.
Students can completely explore this activity to widen their knowledge, or you can give them guiding parameters. It’s up to you in how simple or complicated you’d like this to be!
Help your students master science content!
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