This lesson is a unit project that focuses on an ecosystem in California. It is the students' choice of which ecosystem they choose to focus on. After visiting the San Francisco Zoo to get an idea of the different types of animals and plants found in California, students will participate in a multi-step project-based learning unit. Parts of this unit include a model of their living organism's habitat, experimenting on how soil affects plant life, tri-fold presentation on their animal/plant, and a final project of helping replenish California's ecosystem (if possible). This project is a problem-based inquiry unit where students have a stated problem that will be addressed throughout the unit and, in the end, propose a solution for. It also encourages collaboration, not only with classmates and community members, but also their greater community. 

This particular project based learning unit focuses and completes all three sections listed in this pedagogy: for core ideas, students are focusing on the interactions of organisms within an ecosystem (seeing how they interact, seeing how they coexist, and more); for crosscutting concepts, students hypothesize how limited resources or organisms within the ecosystem effect that ecosystem; and for scientific and engineering practices, students design and conduct an experiment about those limited resources and organisms to see how replenishing could negatively or positively affect the ecosystem. With the project based learning process, students are engaged throughout the entire process, asking questions and getting to know the basic concept at the beginning to then be posed a real-world problem question to then research about and conduct experiments to try and solve the problem. 

Project based learning is used to connect the basic concept standards to real-world issues because the whole reason that students learn these standards is to better help their community outside of school; they take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to their community and greater community. This project–specifically focusing on California and its ecosystem–opened my eyes on how to involve students in the problem-solving process by involving people within the community, where to go to inquire about unknown things, and anticipate questions/problems students might encounter along the way to I can help them be success through my support.