Unit 6 · Ecosystems & Our Footprint
Driving question: How do living things depend on each other and on us? Across five lessons students follow energy flowing one way from the sun through food webs and matter cycling endlessly through living things and the soil — then turn the lens on human impact and design a real solution to a problem in their own community. This unit closes the year by making the Energy & Matter throughline explicit and triumphant: energy flows and dissipates; matter cycles and is conserved.
The lessons
Where does the energy in a schoolyard come from?
Food chains and webs; energy flows from the sun through producers to consumers, losing heat at every step. Energy pyramid.
MS-LS2-3 Week 2Where does matter go when things eat and die?
Decomposers, the carbon and nutrient cycle — matter is conserved and recycled, contrasting with one-way energy flow.
MS-LS2-3 Week 3What happens when one piece of the web changes?
Interdependence, population dynamics, limiting factors — remove one species and the whole patch shifts.
MS-LS2-1 · MS-LS2-2 · MS-LS2-4 Week 4What is our footprint?
Human impact on biodiversity and climate; reading data of change over time; how humans redirect energy and matter flows at large scale.
MS-ESS3-3 · MS-ESS3-4 · MS-ESS3-5 Week 5 · Performance taskDesign a solution to a real schoolyard or community impact
Year capstone: argue from evidence, design a solution, trace energy & matter through it, reflect on the whole year's throughline. Scored with a 3D rubric.
MS-ESS3-3 (integrating LS2-1 · LS2-3 · LS2-4)