Virginia Standard Breakdown

Students will explore how living things (including people!) interact with each other and with the nonliving parts of their environment.

Key ideas we’ll cover:

🌍 Interrelationships – How plants, animals, and humans depend on one another in populations, communities, and ecosystems.

🍴 Food webs – How energy moves through an ecosystem (who eats what).

🔄 Changes in niches and habitats – How an organism’s role or home can change during its life cycle.

🧩 Classification – How scientists organize and identify different organisms.

Why is this important

Understanding how organisms interact with each other and their environment helps us see how everything in nature is connected. 🌎

• It shows us why plants, animals, and humans all depend on one another.

• It helps us understand how changes (like losing a habitat or adding a new species) can affect the whole ecosystem.

• It teaches us how energy flows, so we can see why protecting resources like plants and clean water matters.

• It gives us tools (like classification) to organize living things and better understand the world around us.

Terms to know

• Organism – Any living thing (plants, animals, people, etc.).

• Ecosystem – All the living and nonliving things in an area and how they interact.

• Population – A group of the same kind of organism living in one place.

• Community – Different populations of organisms living together in one area.

• Habitat – The place where an organism lives.

• Niche – An organism’s “job” or role in its ecosystem (what it eats, where it lives, how it affects others).

• Food Chain – A path that shows how energy moves from one organism to another.

• Food Web – Many food chains linked together, showing how energy flows in an ecosystem.

• Classification – Sorting and grouping organisms based on their features.

• Life Cycle – The stages an organism goes through from birth, to growth, to reproduction, and eventually death.

Organizing Ecosystems

Population → a group of the same organisms

Community → all living things in an environment

Ecosystem → living and nonliving things in an environment

Food Web

A food web is like a big map that shows who eats what in an ecosystem. 🌎🐾🌿

Instead of being just a straight line, it looks more like a web because most animals eat more than one kind of food. For example, a fox might eat rabbits, but it could also eat mice or berries. All those connections link together in a web. 🦊🥕🐇

👉 Food Chain vs. Food Web

• A food chain is a simple path of energy (like grass → rabbit → fox).

• A food web shows lots of food chains connected together, making it more realistic.

Think of it this way: a food chain is like one story, but a food web is the whole library! 📚