Here we offer you an educational material about Biodiversity that we have designed so that you can delve into it in the classroom, and approach Biodiversity with your students from different perspectives.
This material is especially designed for the first and second grade of ESO. However, we believe that you can use it in other grades perhaps with some adaptations.
We trust your expertise and knowledge of your group and encourage you to squeeze them to the max.
This proposal has been developed by a group of people dedicated to research, specifically researchers from the Center d’Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CEAB), a research center of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the reference state agency for research and technological development, from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
We have created them based on our expertise in the subject, valuing our scientific approach, with all that this implies: a sample of results obtained with the scientific method, endorsed and contrasted by the scientific community around the world.
Biodiversity is a concept that human beings have created to evaluate biological diversity, and it encompasses all forms of life, evolutionary, ecological and cultural processes that sustain it. We have developed formulas to quantify it and we try to understand it at all the scales at which it manifests itself, be it an organism, a set of organisms, a species, an ecosystem or the planet Earth itself. To reach a deep understanding of what Biodiversity is and to make its value visible, our proposal works on 4 concepts:
- BIODIVERSITY, our ultimate goal of understanding,
- RESILIENCE, as a complementary term that helps to value Biodiversity,
- SCIENCE, to understand and value our approach,
- CONSERVATION, as a tool to avoid the loss of biodiversity.
At a methodological level, our proposal seeks to facilitate the process of creating knowledge, in a «cumulative» way: we start by valuing what we already know and start asking ourselves what we don’t know yet; then we add content and understanding according to the child’s maturational level and our interest; and lastly, we evaluate how much of this knowledge has been incorporated and understood, leaving the door open to continue incorporating knowledge.
We propose three activities for each concept; three approaches with different, and at the same time complementary, languages and teaching tools, with the aim of ensuring that, in the classroom, everyone can understand in depth the complexity of the topics we present to you.
The three formats are:
- An educational dossier to support teachers in PDF format. Designed to help teachers reinforce important concepts. You will find them in Catalan, Spanish and English.
- An experiential activity in the classroom. Its duration is approximately one hour and it is designed to be carried out independently in the classroom. You don’t need any extra material to carry them out. We suggest you collect the possible results in paper or mural-exhibition format, or online material if the center has a blog.
- A capsule in video format, presented by the reference researcher of the educational proposal. All videos are recorded in Catalan and you can find subtitles in Spanish or English. They last about three or four minutes.
