IV. Appendix
Web of Life, “The Game”
Essential Questions
Adapted from the project Learning Tree
Enduring Understandings
How does the environment affect my partner’s daily life?
How does the environment affect my own? One’s natural environment affects one’s culture.
What is the connection between my partner’s
environment and my own? Elements of the environment are interconnected and
depend on each other for survival.
Activity Description and Important Points
1. Preparation
and building
the web a. Choose and write the names of each environmental element
from the provided List of Environmental Elements on index cards
(make sure you have enough written cards for all the students).
b. Ask each of your students to take a card from a pile in the
middle and hold them up so that everyone can see the all
environmental elements. Make sure the six cards with the *
elements are selected.
c. The student with the “tree” card starts the game by tossing the
ball of twine so someone else in the circle.
d. The person who catches the ball tries to explain how the
element interacts with the tree. Anyone in the group can join in
to help out.
e. Next, the person who caught the ball holds onto the string and
tosses the ball around to a third person. The third person
explains how the environmental element on his/her card
interacts with the second student’s element. Anyone can help.
f. The game continues until everyone has had a turn at catching
the twine.
The twine is now a complex web - everyone in the group is connected
to everyone else.
2. Discussions
Materials
Index Cards
Ball of twine
List of
Environmental
Elements
What is going on here?
The tangled ball of twine has formed a web, just like the complicated
web of life in an ecosystem or environment. The web shows how
closely elements in an ecosystem interact with one another. Anything
that happens to part of the web has an effect on the whole system.
a. Allow your students to talk about how their elements are
connected to others that came up earlier in the game.
b. Chose one of the “basic elements of life” cards and ask your
students if anyone could predict what would happen if this
element was removed from the web. Which other organisms
and elements would be affected?
c. Analyze with your students how “humans” are interconnected
to the elements in the web. Are some elements more
important for humans than others? Do these relationships
change depending where humans live? In a city? Or near by a
forest? What elements are common?
d. Analyze with your students which connections are common
between them and their partners who live in their partner
country.
Back to Table of Contents
2019 Rainforest ArtLink Program “Heritage”
Index Cards
Ball of twine
Page 77