Eighth Grade Science Week 4 Page 1 of 4

Week 4 Announcements

Welcome back to DMPS@home Science week 4. Glad you are here. Last week, we explored creatures born with a uniqueness that may help them survive and reproduce.  Your uniqueness makes you wonderful.  This week, we are to figure out and explore a whole group of organisms and try to figure out how changing environmental conditions may impact the whole group and the future of that organism.  

Goals

This lesson is designed to help you reach the following goal(s). Use the self-check success criteria as guideposts as you strive for the goal(s).  

• Hypothesize, with applied data, how specific traits in a changing environment may impact a population over time.

Self Check Guide Posts  

• Creates a predictive claim that is supported by reasoning and logic.
• Descriptions of the data accurately describe the scenario or situation.
• Explanation includes environmental conditions that positively and negatively impact. individuals and describes how the effects on individuals resonate through populations.

To Do

1. Read about the finches on one of the Galapagos islands
2. Predict what you think will happen to the number and appearance of finches if the amount of precipitation changes.
3. Examine five-year finch data at various precipitation levels and describe the trends.
4. Explain how changing environmental factors can impact the traits of a population.
5. Predict how global climate change may impact future populations.
   
   

Let's Get Started

 Our planet is a big place and everything is connected to each other in countless ways. Learning about our complex world means we have to often limit our observations and research to focus on small areas or groups.  For example, if we wanted to learn more about social media, we couldn't study all people on all types of social media. Instead, we could focus on a small group of friends in a particular place using one app. This grouping, the same creatures in the same place is called a population. We could then use our findings for that one group to maybe make sense of larger friends groups in similar situations.  Humans use this learning, called inductive reasoning or logic all the time.  Whenever you use smaller, specific observations to make larger, more general claims.  This week are focusing on birds on a remote island as a way to understand birds all over the world.  

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