Middle School Science Lessons

Adopt a City Lesson 9

Objectives: students will learn more about the biome that they live in and compare it to the biome of their adopted city.

Lesson Resources:

• Abiotic & Biotic Factors – a review or introduction if needed (Google slides, view only)
• Biomes Student handout (Google doc, view only, make a copy to edit)
• Biome Viewer – 👩🏻‍💻🧑🏻‍💻this awesome interactive world map that shows biomes and details about each including wildlife, you can also click on two biomes and compare them side by side
• NatGeo Biomes -👩🏻‍💻 Interactive map with more terrestrial detail
• Latitude/Longitude: 🧑🏻‍💻 use this to find the latitude (North or South) for your locations
• Biomes Concept Map – a nice way to synthesize the information, have each biome group tell the class their findings from Biology Corner
• Biomes Map – Students can color in biomes of North America and also a world map color by number from Biology Corner
• Discovering Rainforest locations – an additional lesson for students to investigate temperature, soil, rainfall, biodiversity, and rainforest locations.

Lesson Ideas:

• Show the Introduction to Biomes video below, ask students which Biome they think they are in and why.
• Introduce what biomes are and show the interactive map from NASA 👩🏻‍💻
  • Which biome do we live in?
  • What other parts of the world have a biome similar to ours?
  • Where is your adopted city?
  • Does it similar or different to where we are?
• Assign small groups to research information about the biome that you live in. Have one group do vegetation, another group do wildlife, another group do the top half of the abiotic chart, another group do the bottom half, and then compile your data together so that everyone has the same information about where you live before they research their adopted city.
• You can group students with different adopted cities that are in similar biomes together for their research

Links for student research: These are a good stepping stone to start their research

• NASA Mission Biomes – a good place to start
• Moo Moo Math and Science – list of Biomes movies
• Geography Pods – Task 2 has the videos for each biome
• Nat Geo – resources for in depth information
• PBS: biomes
• Britannica or World Book– way better than Wikipedia