Engage

Take a look at this illustration by artist Julia Beery. Julia made a diagram of the insects in her backyard. Consider the following questions in a discussion with a small group or partner and then write out your own answers:

• What types of observations does Julia make about the insects and spiders in her backyard?
• She uses the word “niche” to describe a spider in the lemon plant. What do you think niche means?
• What is the difference between a habitat and a niche?

Explore

Explore the Community Journal Choice Board to learn about ecological niches and page layout techniques.

Explain 

Presentation and Drawing Lesson with your Art Mentor!

Your class’s community journal art mentor will visit and present a lesson illustrating niches with different page layouts. You will learn about these page layout techniques:

• Comic strip
• Motion sequence
• Close-up

Presentation: Ecological Niches: Illustrating a Day in the Life

Apply

Go back to the life history research you did on an organism in Part 3. What stage of the life cycle do you expect your subject to be in during this time of year? Where do you expect to see your chosen organism, and what do you expect it to be doing?

Do some additional independent research to learn about the niche that your organism occupies in your neighborhood’s ecology. Here are some questions to consider

• What role does the organism play in its community?
• How do your observations of the organism support this information about its niche?
• Where else in the world is this organism found?
• Can you find examples of this same species, or another species, occupying the same niche that you’ve observed in a different part of the world?

Add this to the research that you collected about the life history of your species in Part 3

Illustrating a Niche

Go back out into your neighborhood and find the same organism that you researched for Part 3. Using the skills that you’ve developed for field sketching, create a diagram or illustration, using words and images, to describe what it is doing. Here are some questions to consider:

• How would you describe the role it plays in its environment?
• How is it interacting with living and nonliving things around it?

When making your diagram or illustration, use some of the page layout techniques that you learned in the Explain section. you can use comic strip panels, or have a closeup observation paired with an illustration of the environment the creature lives in. You can include multiple illustrations that relate to each other on one page.

Share

Share pictures of your journal pages on your class’s Padlet. Find your teacher’s name and your class and add your pages below. When you share your journal pages, also comment on one other students’ journal page from your class.

https://padlet.com/wffeducation/shrmkgpjtjtx5kst

Reflect

Return to the image and the discussion questions from the Engage section and add to your responses based on what you’ve learned in this section:

• What types of observations does Julia make about the insects and spiders in her backyard?
• She uses the word “niche” to describe a spider in the lemon plant. What do you think niche means?
• What is the difference between a habitat and a niche?

Extend

Create a GIF of your niche illustration!

• Use the illustrations that you made of your organism or create new ones that show its behavior or movement
• Upload multiple illustrations to GIPHY (you can create a free account)
• Add text explaining the organism’s niche or behavior
• Here’s an example: