Shrub Steppe Landscape Emphasis: Earth’s Systems

Rationale
Using this interactive display gives context and scope to essential concepts.
Practicing Landscape poster strategies will:
By using the Shrub Steppe Landscape at each grade level, the intent is for students and teachers to have a common reference point for accessing prior knowledge and constructing new knowledge.
How to Use the Landscape Poster
This tool enhances student participation and helps them construct their own learning. The teacher guides student interactions through the use of questioning strategies to develop key concepts by making connections to Earth’s larger systems.
Key concept to pay particularly close attention to: energy transfer driven by the sun.
GUIDELINES
These are merely suggestions; you may choose to be very specific or quite broad in your use of the Shrub Steppe Landscape.
Location
Be sure to hang the Landscape poster in a highly visible and student-accessible area to achieve ultimate student interaction.
Pre-assessment
Before beginning a unit, assess students’ prior knowledge by allowing students to tie their thoughts to the Landscape.
Provide students with a blank piece of drawing paper, or blackline master, to place in their notebook and capture what they perceive as important aspects of the Landscape.
Shrub Steppe Species (S3) Cards
How many sets of S3 Cards you make will depend on how you choose to use them. At minimum, a class set of 6-per-page cards will serve in poster discussions and food web games. Laminated cardstock will be most durable, and can be adhered to the poster or wall with tape loops. Each student should have a b&w set of 12-per-page cards to store in an envelope near the blackline landscape in their science notebook.
S3 Cards can be useful tools for a variety of learning experiences, including
Vocabulary and Drawing/Picture Tie-ins
Interdisciplinary Strategies
WRITING
ELL (English Language Learners)
READING
Non-fiction trade books and science reference books provide contextual opportunities for extended learning.
Enhancement Activities
SCALE
Discuss perspective.
STICK PUPPETS
Students can make simple stick puppets of shrub steppe animals and plants to explain ecosystem dramas.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Digital imagery captured by students throughout the year can illustrate relevant phenomena, and be added to the landscape and kept as a notebook reference.
Using this interactive display gives context and scope to essential concepts.
Practicing Landscape poster strategies will:
- Provide opportunities to make connections between classroom concepts and the real world.
- Serve as a springboard to daily discussions about science as it relates to current events, geography, math concepts, etc.
- Create a dynamic and ongooing document of what students observe and learn.
- Enable pre-assessment, ongoing, and embedded assessments.
- Tether science units to the students’ world.
- Expand the concepts covered in the current life/earth sciences unit as well as enable students to recall and share knowledge from previous units and life experiences.
- Allow concepts to be revisited and expanded upon through increasingly sophisticated additions to the display at each grade level.
- Meet the needs of each individual classroom.
By using the Shrub Steppe Landscape at each grade level, the intent is for students and teachers to have a common reference point for accessing prior knowledge and constructing new knowledge.
How to Use the Landscape Poster
This tool enhances student participation and helps them construct their own learning. The teacher guides student interactions through the use of questioning strategies to develop key concepts by making connections to Earth’s larger systems.
Key concept to pay particularly close attention to: energy transfer driven by the sun.
GUIDELINES
These are merely suggestions; you may choose to be very specific or quite broad in your use of the Shrub Steppe Landscape.
Location
Be sure to hang the Landscape poster in a highly visible and student-accessible area to achieve ultimate student interaction.
Pre-assessment
Before beginning a unit, assess students’ prior knowledge by allowing students to tie their thoughts to the Landscape.
Provide students with a blank piece of drawing paper, or blackline master, to place in their notebook and capture what they perceive as important aspects of the Landscape.
Shrub Steppe Species (S3) Cards
How many sets of S3 Cards you make will depend on how you choose to use them. At minimum, a class set of 6-per-page cards will serve in poster discussions and food web games. Laminated cardstock will be most durable, and can be adhered to the poster or wall with tape loops. Each student should have a b&w set of 12-per-page cards to store in an envelope near the blackline landscape in their science notebook.
S3 Cards can be useful tools for a variety of learning experiences, including
- illustrating species relationships
- multi-purpose trading cards
- illustrating energy transfer on the poster, in the notebook
- writing prompts
- jump-off point for research (eg. learn different hawk species in shrub steppe)
- developing food web games
Vocabulary and Drawing/Picture Tie-ins
- Vocabulary words can be displayed to add meaning to scientific drawings or as labels to parts of the display. Use 3x5 cards or post-it notes to add vocabulary and/or labels. You could also use a vis-a-vis marker to write directly on a laminated poster.
- As you proceed through your unit, students or teacher add pictures (sketch or photo) to the Landscape.
- Yarn, pipe cleaners or labeled arrows can be used to show different cycles, energy flow, food webs, food chains, or to show relationships between creatures or processes.
- Dimensional additions could include realia, pop-ups, pockets, and foldable items. Use real objects such as seeds, pressed plants, insects, etc. as well as newspaper & magazine pictures & articles.
Interdisciplinary Strategies
WRITING
- Use varied sentence structures to define illustrations. Use specific strategies to provide the variation, i.e. begin sentences with a subject, preposition, an “ly” word, an “ing” word, a clause (eg. because…) or with, when, while, since, as, if.
- Extend a writing lesson on the use of strong verbs, adjectives, similes, or metaphors in science writing.
- Extend a grammar lesson such as correct use of singular and plural nouns or subject-verb agreement into students’ science writing.
- Use outlines to help students organize thoughts if writing paragraphs which explain their additions to the Landscape.
ELL (English Language Learners)
- Visual Scaffolding: help student understand vocabulary through use of visuals.
- Realia: Use real objects to help build background knowledge and vocabulary.
- Leveled Questioning: adjust level of questioning to students’ language proficiency. Employ visuals, gestures, pointing, etc.
- Imaging: Encourage students to create mental images of what is being read or discussed.
- Sorting: Vary the criteria to deepen understanding of vobulary and concepts.
- Vocabulary Role Play: act out, animate each word
- Word Walls: Display vocabulary with visual clues about their meaning.
READING
Non-fiction trade books and science reference books provide contextual opportunities for extended learning.
Enhancement Activities
SCALE
Discuss perspective.
- Why is sagebrush in foreground larger than snow-capped mountain in background?
- Why are student drawings larger in scale than the actual landscape?
STICK PUPPETS
Students can make simple stick puppets of shrub steppe animals and plants to explain ecosystem dramas.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Digital imagery captured by students throughout the year can illustrate relevant phenomena, and be added to the landscape and kept as a notebook reference.