 Avon Central School  9 th Grade Living Environment  AP Biology  8 th grade accelerated course

I loved that this lesson focused on microbiology and that it really made my students reflect on the importance and interdependence of an ecosystem as a whole. This was a great lesson to introduce my students to other factors that affect climate besides the standard textbook topics. My students were amazed to learn that tiny microbes could have such an important impact on climate.

Include more bacterial types. I wish that the lesson had students examine data. I think the idea of the power point presentation was fine, but if you wanted more student interaction, a jigsaw activity would also work well with this lesson.

You could have each student report his or her assigned microbe to a smaller group and each member of the group could fill out a small organizer on the influence of each of the microbes I also like the idea of a gallery walk where students would prepare a small poster of their findings and then display them around the room. The teacher could create a scavenger hunt from the posters and each student in the class could then participate in the hunt by circulating around to each poster to learn about each microbe.

Ocean Microbes Feel a Warming Climate’s Effects feel-a-warming-climates-effects feel-a-warming-climates-effects Climate Change Altering Oceanic Food Chain by Allowing Certain Microbes to Survive 3/climate-change-altering-oceanic-food-allowing-certain- microbes-survive.htm 3/climate-change-altering-oceanic-food-allowing-certain- microbes-survive.htm Bacteria 6 Miles Above Earth's Surface Impacting Climate Microbes will joust for survival in Earth's warming climate sn-microbes-climate sn-microbes-climate

This lesson did help my students understand the concept of the biological pump. It made the discussion of a complex topic much easier to navigate. I liked that it challenged my students to apply various environmental conditions to a biological model I liked that the lesson encouraged students to analyze and make predictions.

My 9 th graders struggled with some of the higher level discussion questions dealing with the biogeographical provinces and the dust and iron deposition. The website link located within the power point was confusing to some of my students, and as a result some of my students quickly lost interest in the topic. We did some extra research on the topic which helped, but this was a challenging lesson for my lower level students.

CO 2 Phytoplankton Zooplankton Higher Level Consumers Bacteria CO 2 Consumption Decomposition Remineralization Respiration Photosynthesis

 1. Traveling around the room as part of the biological pump.  2. Give the students manipulatives and have them model the biological pump in smaller groups  3. Throw in some mathematical problem solving

I used a graphic organizer to go along with the power point so my students had something to refer to as we discussed the questions. The Biological Pump change1/06_2.shtml The Biological Productivity of the Ocean: Section 3 /the-biological-productivity-of-the-ocean-section The Ocean Carbon Cycle Video