Decomposers Lesson 5 Learning Goals

Target Performances

Activity

Target Performance

Lesson 5 – Explaining How Decomposers Grow (students as explainers)

Activity 5.1: Tracing the Processes of Fungi Growing: Digestion and Biosynthesis

Students “zoom in” to the structure and function of a mushroom’s organ systems and cells, tracing atoms and energy.

(Optional) Activity 5.2: Molecular Models for Fungi Growing: Digestion and Biosynthesis

Students use molecular models to explain how polymers are broken into monomers during the process of digestion and monomers are linked into polymers during biosynthesis.

Activity 5.3: Explaining How Fungi Grow: Digestion

Students explain how matter moves and changes and how energy changes during digestion by a fungus.

Activity 5.4: Explaining How Fungi Grow: Biosynthesis

Students explain how matter moves and changes and how energy changes during biosynthesis in a mushroom’s cells.

NGSS Performance Expectations

High School

  • Chemical Reactions. HS-PS1-4. Develop a model to illustrate that the release or absorption of energy from a chemical reaction system depends on the changes in total bond energy.
  • Chemical Reactions. HS-PS1-7. Use mathematical representations to support the claim that atoms, and therefore mass, are conserved during a chemical reaction.
  • From Molecules to Organisms: Structures and Processes. HS-LS1-2. Develop and use a model to illustrate the hierarchical organization of interacting systems that provide specific functions within multicellular organisms.
  • Matter and Energy in Organisms and Ecosystems. HS-LS1-6. Construct and revise an explanation based on evidence for how carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen from sugar molecules may combine with other elements to form amino acids and/or other large carbon-based molecules.

Middle School

  • Structure and Properties of Matter. MS-PS1-1. Develop models to describe the atomic composition of simple molecules and extended structures.
  • Chemical Reactions. MS-PS1-5. Develop and use a model to describe how the total number of atoms does not change in a chemical reaction and thus mass is conserved.
  • From Molecules to Organisms: Structures and Processes. MS-LS1-3. Use argument supported by evidence for how the body is a system of interacting subsystems composed of groups of cells.
  • Matter and Energy in Organisms and Ecosystems. MS-LS1-7. Develop a model to describe how food is rearranged through chemical reactions forming new molecules that support growth and/or release energy as this matter moves through an organism.