Ultimate Survival Unit Reflection

1. Reflect on what has helped you in understanding the "big idea" of the unit.
(Big Idea: Students will understand the use and management of natural resources, the transformation of resources into human capital, goods, tools and machines as well as sustainable development of human society to maintain the delicate balance between man and the natural environment.)

The big idea of the unit was learning about combining man life and the natural environment to get the result of ultimate survival. The fact that helped me understand the big idea of this unit is the difference between what we do, and how we are able to decrease the goodness of a natural environment. Also, when people are getting paper and other products from trees, they decrease biodiversity by harming trees- resulting in any bad things such as loss of the species' homes, reducing amounts of oxygen and the increasment of carbon dioxide....
The things that helped me understand this main "big" idea of the unit, is: movies that we watched, articles that I read for current events in order for better understanding the relations between the facts, and finally the project about packaging that we did at the end- it made me think about the necessities of using and wasting resources.

2. Reflect on the unit question (What is a necessity and how does an organism ensure survival of its species within its environment?) and how it relates to the unit title: Ultimate Survival.

A necessity is something that a species really needs in order to survive. For example, a long time ago when we did the plants labs, that organism needed space, grow and reproduce, needed water and nutrients etc... This also goes for other species.
And organism for instance catches another organism which ensures its' survival because it can feed itself by its' prey. It relates to the title: Ultimate Survival because the organism I was just talking about saved itself. But, ultimate survival also is connected with human species, but in a negative order- is not doing things just to survive, but is doing more things in order to enjoy and full-fill others, not basic things and needs. That is why man harms the environment and that leads to ultimate fights of other species in order to survive.

3. How did the unit question allow us to view survival through The Area of Interaction: Environments:(FOR EXAMPLE: The effects of one environment on another, the roles our environments play in the lives and well-being of humankind, and the effects of our actions, attitudes and constructs, such as sustainable development and conservation.)

The areas of interactions of one environment species onto another environment species are overlapping. That means that one species has strong connections and influences onto another and that relation can be the: Prey or predator, symbiosis or parasitism.... It also shows the actions that humans are doing in order to repair what they did by harming the environment such as the biodiversity conservation.

4. What would you have liked to do more of? Less of?

In my opinion, this project went really great, and we covered a lot of things about this unit. However, I would have done less of the lab report about plants. It was pointless because one of the plants kept dying, and the point of the experiment was for them to be able to survive in a closed ecosystem, but it was my partner and I who made a mistake- we added much more water than it needed so I learned that too much is sometimes bad. I would like to do more of practical projects because I really enjoyed this packaging project we did a couple of days ago, but do less of current events (NO OFFENSE MRS.M!) because I really didn't have enough time to do them at the time I should have done them.

5. In your point of view, how well did we investigate the unit question, concept, and area of interaction? Include this in your reflection as well and give specific examples to support your opinions.

I think that we perfectly covered the unit question because we were studying about everything that supports the unit question; "Ultimate Survival." But I also think that we should work on this much more than in one unit only. This is because I realized how the relationship between all the parts of one ecosystem are complicated and how big and bad the influence of us, humans in an environment can be. I also think that we should have more understanding in environmental things such as the sustainable development. There are a lot of biodiversity conservations, human footprints, and all these things are very interesting and helpful in order to survive.