Mrs. Averett's Classroom: The Biosphere

Learning Targets: 

• Demonstrate organizational skills such as keeping a daily calendar of assignments and activities and maintaining a notebook of class work.
  
• Keep your binder organized and updated. 
  
• Apply strategies before, during, and after reading to increase fluency and comprehension (e.g., adjusting purpose, previewing, scanning, making predictions, comparing, inferring, summarizing, using graphic organizers) with increasingly challenging texts. 
  
• Improve understanding of material by outlining material presented in class. 
• Use a variety of appropriate sources (e.g. Internet, scientific journals) to retrieve relevant information; cite references properly. 
  

• Apply active reading, listening, and viewing techniques by taking notes on classroom discussions, lectures, oral and/or video presentations, or assigned at-home reading, and by underlining key passages and writing comments in journals or in margins of texts, where permitted.  
• Stay on task during class, annotate provided PowerPoint notes and take additional notes during board discussions. 
  
• Outline provided materials and assimilate this information into material presented in class.
  
• Apply knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon affixes, inflections, and roots to understand unfamiliar words and new subject area vocabulary in increasingly challenging texts.
• Be able to define and correctly spell all vocabulary words.
• Actively participate in small-group and large-group discussions, assuming various roles. 
• Participate in class discussions  and ask questions when needed on a daily basis. 
  

• Define and provide examples of habitat and niche. 

• Explain how the amount of life any environment can support is limited by the available matter and energy and by the ability of ecosystems to recycle the residue of dead organic materials. 
  

• Explain how organisms cooperate and compete in ecosystems and how interrelationships and inter-dependencies of organism may generate ecosystems that are stable for thousands of years. 
  

• Describe examples of competition, symbiosis, and predation.

• Explain the concept of carrying capacity

• Describe the growth of populations, including exponential and logistic growth (e.g., design and conduct an experiment investigating bacterial growth using appropriate calculations). 
  

• Explain the process of ecological succession, and describe the different communities that result. 
  

• Read and describe current journal articles relating to environmental concerns (e.g., loss of biodiversity, habitat loss, pollution). 
  

• Discuss and evaluate the significance of human interference with major ecosystems (e.g., the loss of genetic diversity in cloned crops or animals). 
  

• Revise, refine, and proofread own and others writing, using appropriate tools to find strengths and weaknesses and to seek strategies for improvement (using good writing methods). 
  
• State, elaborate, use an example and draw a connection when answering open - ended questions.  
  
• Safely use laboratory equipment and techniques when conducting scientific investigations.  

• Manipulate variables in experiments using appropriate procedures (e.g. controls, multiple trials). 
  

• Collect, organize, and analyze data accurately and precisely (e.g. using scientific techniques and mathematics in experiments)

• Interpret results and draw conclusions, revising hypothesis as necessary and/or formulating additional questions or explanations.
  

• Use mathematics to enhance the scientific inquiry process (e.g., choosing appropriate units of measurement, graphing and manipulating experimental data)

• Write and speak effectively to present and explain scientific results, using appropriate terminology and graphics. 
  

• Use appropriate essay-test taking and timed-writing strategies that address and analyze the questions.  
  

• Demonstrate familiarity with test formats and test administration procedures to increase speed and accuracy. 
  
• Complete tests within permitted time limits. 

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