students need to make an a song or other creative object as a way of getting people to digest scientific literacy on an environmental issue related to environmental forensics.

We're exploring homelessness in our county and meeting with organizations supporting them from emergency shelter to medical care to food insecurity to housing

设计一个直升机式的风筝。

Facilitate a 'Create-A-Creature Workshop' where students collaborate to design a unique organism, detailing its place within an ecosystem and the interactions it has at various biological levels. Use craft materials to bring their creatures to life in 3D form.

Assign each student an individual organism. Students must correctly draw the levels of organization into their pizza slices made from triangle-shaped pieces of paper or cardboard. The narrowest end of the slice should represent the organism level. Then ask students to move up to a broader area on the slice to draw a representation of a population of that organism. Where does the organism exist in their community? What ecosystem does the individual organism exist? At the wide end of the pizza slice, students should draw a picture of the biosphere.

Have students visit a nearby park or wild area where they can describe the environment and identify organisms. Instruct them to create diagrams that portray relationships and links between organisms. Using their observations, have students create three descriptive models of this ecosystem—one that displays organisms and resources in balance, one that displays the results of an imbalance caused by competition among organisms for a resource, and one that displays the results of an imbalance caused by competition from an introduced species for a resource.

Invasive species are a huge problem across the United States. Have students visit the New York Invasive Species website at http://www.nyis.info/. Determine the estimated number and type of invasive species living in two different parts of the state. Teachers might choose to ask each student to research one specific invasive species so that species are not duplicated. Students can write and present a report on these species to explain what they are and how they compete with native species for resources. As a class, discuss how these invasive species might occur in the same areas and how that would further complicate survival for native species. Take a walk around campus to see if they can find any invasive species.

Leay