WE'RE ALL CONNECTED

This week, the kids learned about ecosystems! They played the "web of life game" with some organisms and physical components from an estuary ecosystem (e.g., oyster, sun, brackish water, sea star, sediment, human) to show how the parts are all interconnected. The kids wore stickers on their foreheads and had to guess their identities based on clues from other students. They passed a ball of twine any time they formed a connection with another part of the ecosystem. And they continued passing around the twine until everyone was holding a part of the complex, tangled web. When I pulled on the twine a little bit, the students could see how a disturbance in one part of the ecosystem could impact other parts of the ecosystem too. "Because we're all connected!" Both literal and very poetic.