Mr. Jamie Watts Presents

Last week we had an amazing guest speaker in our Grade 7 classroom to talk about his experiences in both the Arctic and Antarctic poles.



After his presentation, you all created a food web in your notebooks or online and posted them to your blog. I would like you to now create a new post OR go back to your blog post and write a reflection about the various things you learned about these two amazing ecosystems and how all the organisms there interact to ensure their species survival.

Points to discuss:

• What interactions between these animals did you notice? (For example, think about these various forms of interactions that you have been studying for your project: producers, consumers, decomposers, predation, commensalism, parasitism, mutualism)
  
• Why do animals migrate? (What is occurring within their environment that triggers this response?)
  
• How do animals know when it's right to reproduce? What conditions are they looking for?
  
• When do most large animals reproduce? What does it depend on?
  
• What adaptations did the animals exhibit in the polar region? (For example: body shape, appendages, wing span, food, coloration, stream-lined bodies, teeth, beaks, blubber, fur, group formations, hooks on tentacles, etc...)
• What various (breeding) mating rituals do species have?
  
• How do they ensure survival of their species? (Feeding, reproduction-production rates/birth rates/death risks, growth, etc...
• How did this presentation provide examples of what we have been studying?
  
• What are you wondering about now?
  
• How did Mr. Watts help tie in everything that we have been discussing during this unit?

If you want to find out more of what Mr. Watts does and is still doing, here is a Website I found. :)
http://www.quarkexpeditions.com/why-quark/our-people/expedition-team/jamie-watts

*When you have finished your own response, visit at least 4 other classmates blogs and see what they have reflected upon, once you do this go back and comment on your own blog with additions to make to your primary blog post. Questions to help you: What did you notice that other classmates talked about? How did they structure their writing? What ideas did you forget that they reminded you of? What did they write that sparked your own thinking? What did you like about your own writing?