Rationale:
Why am I teaching this unit? Think of a personal hook:
Have you ever gone on a nature walk with your family or friends where you live or surrounding area and found seashells, sand dollars, anything else pertaining to ocean life? Did you ever wonder how it got there? Or why is it there because the ocean is thousands of miles away?
That is exactly what happened when my son Tyrone went on a nature walk with his grandma Phyllis and his cousins. Back in 2012, we had just moved from Kayenta, Arizona to Tonalea, Arizona. Nothing particular about the move, because we just moved from one Reservation Community to the next. When Tyrone came home, he was so happy and very excited. He said, “Momma look what I found?” Before I could say anything, he said, “The ocean was so far away! How did these babies show up here on the mesa?” That mesa over there pointing to the Mesa in front of our house.
In his hand were a bunch of seashells and an almost perfect sand dollar. The look on his face was amazing. When he saw the look on my face, he was puzzled. He asked, “why I had a weird look on my face?” As if he thought and he said it too, “all mommas know everything about the world.”
The question is how did those seashells and sand dollar show up in the middle of the desert? It’s plain and simple that it's in the wrong biome and ecosystem. Is it possible for that to happen? It is possible for that to happen through ecological succession. The land was once an ocean thousands of years or maybe millions of years ago. Think about how many ecosystems and successions that piece of land went through before it became the present ecosystem.
We live in a desert biome/ecosystem in northern Arizona. My students and I live in the desert biome. We live in the higher country of the desert biome near Monument Valley, Utah. We see beautiful sandstone rock formations, and yes, we get very little rain here in Northern Arizona and southeastern Utah. We have a mixture of desert-like landscapes, but we also have some forest areas here. We have a mixture of domesticated animals and some wild animals that live in and around where we live. Animals like coyotes, lizards, horses, sheep, cattle, prairie dogs, chipmunks, squirrels, and bobcats.
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