Students in 7th Grade Honors Science moved their classroom outdoors on March 29 to conduct an ecosystems lab project analyzing living and nonliving things in grassy areas on the ACS campus. Faculty member Kelly Kirchhoff said the warmer weather created the perfect opportunity to do an outdoor lab as the 19 students in the class started a new unit on how living things interact with, and depend on, the other parts of an ecosystem.

The students used magnifying glasses to discover and examine the types of organisms in a 1-meter-square section of ground.  Kirchhoff said each student created a table and recorded every different living and nonliving thing that they found and the number of times they found the item, such as a leaf, a rock, grass, a flower, etc.

After completing their research, the students returned to the classroom to organize and review the data they collected and predict how their observations would change during different times of the year. Kirchhoff said the students will use the information from their lab to create an ecosystem project in April.