Making Connections Throughout Learning

In middle school science, students are adding to and building upon concepts that they have learned throughout elementary school. They continue to make connection through further learning. In a lesson that I taught a 6th grade science class, I made connections between abiotic and biotic factors with previous concepts that the students had learned in elementary school. Students start out by being able to differentiate between living and nonliving organisms. In the next grade, they then move on to sorting an classifying living and nonliving organisms. After this sorting, the following year, the

next step is to identify factors such as temperature and precipitation that affects the living organisms. Next year, they also identify the physical aspects of an environment that affect the living organisms. They start to go more in depth in their next year of learning, and investigate how producers in an environment need the nonliving elements to survive. After this investigation, another year later, they observe how organisms live and survive in their ecosystems by interacting with living and nonliving organisms. Finally in 6th grade, this all leads up to the goal of describing the biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) parts of an ecosystem and how organisms interact.