| Letter for Teachers |
Dear teacher or parent,
The purpose of this letter is to describe the objective of this lesson as well as to give you some ideas of how to use it with the students.
One of the strong objectives of this multi-disciplinary lesson is not to simply state facts and examples as you find in many biological science texts, but rather for the student to become aware of the facts by doing experiments and uncovering the facts themselves. An example of this is the ecological pyramid. The student will be exposed to the notion that a given number of oak trees can only support a limited number of squirrels by doing an experiment.
Another objective that I had when making this lesson was to awaken the scientific instinct in the students. If this lesson helps any student to pursue a scientific field, I'll be very pleased.
This lesson is pretty broad in its scope. Before using it you may want to go through the whole material and give specific directions to the students on how to go about it. For example, if you really want to emphasize math, you'll probably want to make sure that the students go over the Facts about Population Growth Mathematical Models page. Something else that you might want to consider is to ask the students to write down their hypothesis for each experiment before running it and then share them or discuss them in class.
I would expect that it might take somewhere between six and eight hours for the students to go through the whole lesson, depending on what percentage of the material they cover. One suggestion is to break the lesson into three different portions to be covered in different days. The students could read each portion at home or in a computer lab followed by in-class discussions.
Throughout the lesson you will see 20 boxes that hide answers and hints. These boxes can be locked with a key so that you as a teacher control when they can see the answers. I am considering adding keys to the boxes that provide answers to the experiments (the ones in the "Theory" sections), but I would first like to hear what you think. Please let me know.
I would really appreciate it if you provide me feedback on your actual experience, which I might include in here for other teachers to use. Also, please feel free to let me know if there are any additional words that should be included in the on-line dictionary.
Sincerely,
Jacobo Bulaevsky
Last Updated: Monday, 13-Nov-2000 05:22:04 GMT
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