Hosting an Ecosystem Expo: A Creative Way to Showcase Student Learning

Hosting an ecosystem expo is a great way for students to demonstrate what they have learned while inviting guests to your classroom to see what your students are learning.

Ecosystem Expo

Time: 4-5 hours split into 4-5 days (45-60 minutes each). Students will create their exhibit on the first few days and on the last day students will show off their exhibit to the museum visitors.

Materials:

Trifolds, Boxes, Poster Paper
Scissors, gluesticks and coloring tools
A variety of supplies - use what you have available or let students bring items in from home

Steps:

Students will work in partners or groups of 3.
Students will create a poster, diorama or digital presentation to show:
what their biome looks like
the climate of the biome
location of the biome
labeled organisms
A food web
During the ecosystem expo students will show visitors their ecosystem, discuss the climate, organisms and how that ecosystem supports life. They should be prepared to verbally answer the following questions:
how their biome supports organisms
how organisms rely on each other
how energy is moved through their biome
how organisms would be impacted due to changes to the ecosystem

A trifold of the grasslands showing the location, the organisms and the climate.

FAQ

What do I need to have prepared for this ecosystem expo?

Make sure you have a few materials available like poster paper, coloring tools, scissors and glue. You can allow students to bring items from home too.
Decide how you want students to choose their ecosystem. Ideally, each group does a different biome and there are no repeats. However this will depend heavily on your class size. You can allow them to choose their own biome, you can choose their biome or you can make it completely random and use this wheel to determine what group will do what biome.
Decide who you want to invite to this motion museum. You can invite families or you can just invite non homeroom staff members. You can also invite other grade levels. Younger students would love to visit an older class and see what projects they will get to work on when they are older.

What materials did you use?

Since students can just draw for this project, I didn’t provide many materials. I did provide posters and mini trifolds*. I also pulled out a few supplies I always have on hand like construction paper, yarn, coloring tools, glue sticks and scissors. Some students brought items from home like toy animals or cardboard boxes.

I also offered to print pages for students in case they wanted to type something up and cut it out to put it on the board. I did put a limit on this. 1) They had it typed up and shared with me by the end of the second day and I would print no more than 5 pages per group.

We chose mini poster boards because students don't have to worry about trying to fill a lot of space which saves them time.
Saving Money & Materials Tip: If you have students write and draw their work on regular paper they can carefully tape their work on the poster board. Then it can be removed later and the poster boards can be reused for other projects later.

This project should require very little supplies, do not feel like you need to purchase any items we shared here. Look around the classroom and let students bring items home. You can get high quality projects by just looking around and being creative. We only linked the trifold posters because we use (and re-use) them often and thought it would be helpful if teachers needed ideas of what to provide.