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Choosing a Matter-Return Display for the Museum Prairie

Compare leaf-breakdown designs at a children's museum, then model matter moving among prairie plants, animals, decomposers, soil, and air.

Grade 5ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned to5-LS2-1

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
15 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 5
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Sorting, Short answer, Drawing

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students model matter moving among plants, animals, decomposers, soil, and air.
Students use investigation results to judge a design for returning matter in an ecosystem.
Students distinguish matter pathways from energy entering a plant.

How to use

Read the museum team's test report together, then have students use the graph and evidence to judge the display design and build a connected matter model.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

5-LS2-1

Model how matter moves among plants, animals, decomposers and the environment.

Preview

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Choosing a Matter-Return Display for the Museum Prairie

Use test results to model how matter moves through a prairie exhibit.

Compare the prairie display tests

Read the report and use the graph to answer the questions. The museum team measured the mass of leaf material left after four weeks.

A New Exhibit for the Living Systems Hall

The Riverbend Children's Museum is building a small indoor prairie exhibit. The team wants visitors to see how matter can move through a living system. The exhibit will contain prairie grasses, a few grasshoppers, soil, and a tray of fallen grass leaves. Fungi and bacteria in the soil will act as decomposers. The team wants a cover that keeps leaf material in the tray while still allowing water and air to reach it.

To compare three covers, the team placed 40 grams of dried prairie leaves in each of three identical trays. The trays held the same kind of soil, received the same amount of water, and stayed under the same light. One tray had no cover, one had a loose mesh cover, and one had a solid cover with small side gaps. After four weeks, the team dried and weighed the leaf material left in each tray. Visitors gently bumped each tray the same number of times during the test.

The team also recorded observations. The no-cover tray had seven leaf pieces blown out during the test. The mesh tray had one leaf piece outside the tray. The solid-cover tray had no leaf pieces outside, but its leaves felt nearly as dry as they had at the start. In the no-cover and mesh trays, observers saw more pale fungal threads by the end of the test than at the beginning. The team will use these records to choose a design, but the test does not identify every kind of decomposer in the soil.