Older Readers & Vocabulary

What specific words do you see as vital to your unit that students might have trouble with?

For the ecology unit, I've chosen to focus on the following words:

Ecology (duh)
Population
Community
Habitat
Ecosystem
Biosphere

Producer
Primary Consumer
Secondary Consumer
Decomposer
Top Predator

Competition
Predation
Mutualism
Parasitism

Fixation
Cycle
Flow
Resource

Keystone Species
Exotic Species
Invasive Species
Toxin

How did you go about choosing these words?

These word lists follow some basic thematic groupings: Levels of Organization; Community Roles; Community Interactions; Resource Movement; and Ecological Disturbances. These are, to my mind, the basic concepts that need to be dealt with in order for someone to understand ecology, and the minimum vocabulary terms that you should have access to if you're going to have a serious discussion about ecology.

The activities that we did during the last week and a half focused on community roles and levels of organization. We'll be continuing to hit on those as we get into community interactions and resource movement over the next two weeks. I think that ecological disturbances should be introduced gradually as I touch on the topics related to each type of disturbance; for example, now that I've dealt with community roles, I can introduce the students to what happens when you take out a predator at the top of the food web, or when you remove a key prey resource that a secondary consumer depends on.