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Hello Shalen,
I love pop-bottle ecosystems and used them for years! I have attached a collection of resources to help you.
I would start the project by introducing what they will be doing and hand them the worksheet with their options. The have the option to pick terrestrial only, aquatic only (marine means salt water - didn't want to go there!) and combined. Then they had to select what organisms they wanted - AFTER spending a class researching the information they needed on the organisms. They created a 'shopping list' of the materials they needed in order to have their organisms survive. Each group was responsible for getting a couple of 2 litre pop bottles, plus I would send out an email to the staff to donate some just in case. The following week we would spend a class building the ecosystems and starting the seeds. If you pick fast-growing plants the terrestrial ecosystem will have sprouted over the weekend and they can consider adding their animals. I always had terrariums of stick insects, meal worms, super worms, sowbugs in my classroom just for this project and as classroom 'pets'. An aquarium full of duckweed and aquatic plants would provide the aquatic vegetation, algae (if they thought of scraping it off the glass), and decomposers (if they thought of scooping some of the substrate). I had another aquarium with pond invertebrates - snails, sideswimmers, daphnia to add. Don't worry about setting up all of these terraria/aquaria - you can just go and sample a pond, flip some rocks over and even visit a pet store just before 'build day'. Tailor the handouts to your needs.
The biggest thing I stressed was accurate observation. They kept journals to do this and I have an example of good observations to show them. Observations were done at least twice a week. I sometimes had to put their ecosystems on a cart to wheel in and out of the classroom. In my curriculum, bio-geochemical cycles were stressed but there is no reason why you couldn't add pyramids - energy, biomass, numbers, etc - or food chains/webs.
The students enjoyed these and so did I! (oh, I never really docked them marks if their organisms died - that was just a scare tactic to encourage them to be dilligent!)
Hope this helps,
Gabe Kraljevic
Pop Bottle Ecosystems Collection
(7 items)
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