For its study in the Yonkers Public Schools, Fordham is developing a supported text using materials from a commonly used science text book.
Passage taken directly from “Biology Cycles of Life, Park & Enderle, 2006, Teacher’s Edition, Text relates to Living Environment, NY State Regents High School Exam
Chapter 1 p. 12, 13, Biology: Investigating the Cycles of Life
You know that life uses energy to grow and change over time, or evolve. Scientists also look at life in the present.
Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the relationship of living things with each other and their surroundings. This branch of science looks at how members of the same species and different species live together.
Ecologists look at how organisms act in their environments.
The environment has its own cycles that keep everyday life going.
Ecosystems are made up of all of the living and non-living things in a particular area. As an example, think about a frog in a lily pond. The frog and lilies are living things. The water and rocks are nonliving things. A biologist may want to study why this frog lives in this lily pond.
Ecologists also study the behavior of organisms, or how they respond to stimuli. A stimulus is anything to which an organism reacts. The light coming in your bedroom in the morning is a stimulus that causes you, an organism, to wake up.
Organism’s behaviors often occur in cycles. For example, birds fly south for the winter. Then they fly north in the spring. Chipmunks, woodchucks. box turtles and toads go into hibernation in the winter. As spring approaches, they become active. The way a body receives and sends messages is a cycle. Some cycles happen in less than a second, like body messages. Other cycles take years to run a full course.
The Environment
Have you traveled out of the country? If you have, you may have seen government agents searching luggage or vehicles for plants or animals. The movement of plants and animals across international borders is controlled to protect the wildlife that lives in various ecosystems.
Travelers are not allowed to bring plants and animals from one environment into another/ Ecosystems build up a balance of life that keeps the populations fairly stable. If a plant or animal is released into a new ecosystem, it often can upset this balance.
One example of a disrupted ecosystem is the problem of the African clawed frog in California. African clawed frogs are banned in California, but many people bring them into the state to keep as pets.
Some frogs have escaped into the wild. They have reproduced, creating a new population of wild African clawed frogs. These wild frogs are now causing problems by eating and destroying many of the plants and animals in the state. African clawed frogs are not from, or native to, California. No animals eat them or compete with them for resources. Without competition or predators, the number of frogs has increased rapidly. State officials are looking for ways to control them.
Questions for students:
- Why are African clawed frogs spreading so rapidly in California?
- What resources do plants or animals compete for?
See if you can identify a plant or animal in your local environment that is not native to the area.
In this text we will identify certain words/key phrases that would prove difficult to comprehend for the student who has learning disabilities and has Spanish as his/her first language. We will create a context-specific definition and a context-specific sentence for each of these phrases that the student can click on in a digital text version.
Refer to Project Intersect Digital Library for examples of supported-text digital books
The Intersect Digital Library: http://intersect.uoregon.edu/