Middle School Inquiry Lab on Energy Pyramids
In this lab students will create an energy pyramid to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy between biotic and abiotic parts of the ecosystem.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How does matter and energy cycle in an ecosystem?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
Materials List:
- 21 Styrofoam cups
- crayons or markers of various colors
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students start by choosing an ecosystem they would like to represent on the Styrofoam cups. Using markers or crayons, students will illustrate a number of abiotic factors on a set number of cups to place on the bottom layer. Students will then continue to illustrate, but focusing their attention to the biotic factors that help make up that ecosystem. Producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, etc, students will make sure that they have the correct number of cups at each level that represents a proper pyramid shape. Finally, students will remove abiotic factors from the bottom level and explain how it might affect the rest of the pyramid.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here is one that comes with the lab:
- In which level of your pyramid is there the most energy? Least energy?
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Why is the bottom of the food web wider than the top?
- Where would decomposers be in your pyramid model?
- What would happen if decomposers did not exist in an ecosystem?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
NGSS: MS-LS2-3 – Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy among living and nonliving parts of an ecosystem.
