SNC1W Unit 2: Sustainable Ecosystems and Climate Change

How do ecosystems stay in balance, and what happens when climate change tips them? Students build eco-columns, trace energy flow with the 10% rule, follow carbon, water and nitrogen through their cycles, float spinach leaf disks to see photosynthesis, inflate balloons with yeast to see respiration and survey the schoolyard with quadrats. They code an original lake-ice data set to read the climate signal, study climate impacts on ecosystems and on communities across Canada, learn from practices such as the Three Sisters and Two-Eyed Seeing, and explore farming innovations.

Assessment of learning: a Local Ecosystem Health Report with a rubric, plus a unit test with an answer key.

Lessons

1. What Is an Ecosystem?
2. Build an Eco-Column
3. Energy Flow
4. Cycling Matter
5. Photosynthesis Lab
6. Respiration Lab
7. Biodiversity and Succession
8. Soil, Air and Water Quality
9. Human Impacts
10. Reading the Climate Signal
11. Climate Change and Ecosystems
12. Climate Change and Communities
13. Learning from the Land
14. Farming the Future
15. Taking Action

What you get

• A teacher lesson plan for every lesson: curriculum expectations, learning goals and success criteria, a timed sequence, differentiation, safety notes, look-fors and answer keys
• Detailed slideshows (15 to 17 slides per lesson) with speaker notes on every slide: what to say, what to ask, what to look for and how long to spend, plus warm-ups, worked examples, model answers and answer-key slides
• Student handouts, lab sheets and exit tickets
• Editable Word and PowerPoint files, plus PDFs
• A unit overview, the summative task and rubric, and a unit test with an answer key

Built for the 2022 Ontario Grade 9 Science curriculum (SNC1W, de-streamed), and easy to adapt for any Grade 9 science class.