Reflection 6

This week the goal was to help guild my students to better understand ecology and build

upon their vocabulary. Ecology has a lot of new vocabulary, but breaking down a lot of these

words will help the students be able to better understand the concepts. The weekend before this

week students had vocabulary for homework. This will start getting students familiar with he

words that we will be using in the coming weeks. This unit will be based on what students

already know about ecology and build upon that knowledge. I had decided to take the puma

population in California as an example that we would repetitively throughout the unit. This is

also an example that is real world and something they would see often on the news.

Another example that always seems to get the students excited that was used throughout

the week was the wolves population. We had done an activity that involved labeling what they

think might happen to specific population of wolves and moose. The students seemed to show

more interest when action between species is happening and when there are multiple visuals.

With the wolf activity, the students were given a series of pictures and had to predict what would

happen after each picture. At the end, I gave them the data and surprised many students that their

prediction, though it was the most oblivious answer, was less likely to happen based on statistics.

In the standards this unit needs to have mathematical representations of populations

within an ecosystem. because of this I had showed students a lot of different populations and had

them crate graphs based on predictions and past data. When looking at the wolf populations and

other populations the students noticed a trend. Because of this, the students were able to create a

graph with some data and finish what they predict the graph will look like for the next 10 years.
 This weeks goal was to work on vocabulary, and having situations were they have to use

said vocabulary into realistic situations has helped students develop new linguistic skills and be

able to use the new vocabulary. I was worried that the students would struggle, but I think with

the activities that we had done this week they were able to get some real life experience with

these words. Next weeks goal is to continue to build on students knowledge and learn how to

work on an online environment because the school has been talking about shutting down. If this

happens I need to be prepared to teach online for the students. The goal for the next week is to

transition to more online based learning so that the students, and I, can get used to an online

environment.