Learning with Macroinvertebrates: Activities, Resources, and Lessons

 

This spring I had the wonderful opportunity to take sixth grade classes out for field trips with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They brought the canoes and took one class, while I took the other class to do a macroinvertebrate survey.

Which meant that I had to really brush up on my macros! Luckily, I've worked with these kinds of lessons in the past, and I've found and made plenty of resources to help me along.

Marvelous Macroinvertebrates

Because I'm teaching ELA and not science, I needed to make a strong connection to the ELA concepts and standards. Luckily, I was headed into argumentative text! Exploring an author's claims and how they support main ideas works wonderfully with a study of macroinvertebrates and their importance to streams. Several years ago, I wrote the resource "Marvelous Macroinvertebrates" as part of my Summary and Analysis series. This resource was just what I needed to start the course of study.

When I pulled it out of my filing cabinet I was happy to learn that I had been very smart once upon a time, and the vocabulary part of the article happened to match the vocabulary goals for the Wonders lessons I was replacing. Thank heavens for small mercies! We could look at the roots macro- and micro-, which was a nice vocabulary connection.

The lesson I wrote for the Summary and Analysis activity included taking notes from the text, which worked well for my students. Then, we examined the author's claim that macroinvertebrates "are a big deal for streams." How well is this supported in the text? What evidence is present? (These kinds of things are always a little tricky when I'm the author. Sometimes I tell students that I wrote the text, and sometimes I don't. In this case, I let the author remain anonymous!)

At this point, the concept of "macroinvertebrates" was still pretty fuzzy for my students. They knew about crayfish, but they couldn't really picture anything else. This video about stream surveys helped to make macroinvertebrates a bit more engaging for them...and it enabled us to hit my favorite standard, in which we compare a written text to a video text. 

Of course, I had to balance my desire to teach teach teach about macroinvertebrates with the needs of the ELA lessons that I was working on. We played some ID games on Quizlet to help students know the difference between a crayfish and a mayfly nymph, but we didn't get into many of the technical details of  the insect life cycles.

The Field Trip

My hope was that by the time we actually went on our field trip, students would know enough about macroinvertebrates to engage with the survey and get some good data.

It worked!

Even though two of our days were cold and rainy, the students were wonderful and spent time finding creatures, exploring the stream, and completing the biotic index. We found more mayfly nymphs than I have ever seen before!

The Follow Up

I collected the data from all of our trips, and we put it together into one huge list. Then, students had to make a claim about whether the creek we studied has good water quality, or not. It seems like a really easy question, right? But making a claim and using real facts from your own data to support it is the heart of science. Just getting students to write a paragraph based on this was a challenge!

Next Steps

On future trips, I want to make at least one student group in charge of photography, so that we can document what we find. I was too busy managing students and keeping an eye on the time and making sure that no one fell in (alas, they did!) to do many high quality photographs.

I've experimented with writing a formal field report based on this trip, and I'd like to consider this for next year as well.