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6th grade · Science · Unit 10 of 17

Biodiversity

Variety makes life strong

What your child practices

Why a variety of life makes species and communities more resilient, how species depend on each other, and why biodiversity matters to people.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) teks student expectation: 6.12(B) · predation, competition and symbiosis, including mutualism

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. Biodiversity is the variety of living things in a place.
  2. More variety makes an ecosystem more resilient to change.
  3. Living things interact: competition (both need the same thing) and mutualism (both help each other).
  4. Losing one species can change the whole food web.

Example: Bees get nectar and flowers get pollinated. What kind of relationship is this? Both living things are helped. When both benefit, it is mutualism. Answer: mutualism

Biodiversity in Texas

In the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), this is unit 10 of 17 in 6th grade Science, after Ecosystems and before Cells: Life's Building Blocks.

Gradelings describes a child's practice on this unit as Beginning, Approaching, Meeting or Exceeding (Four practice steps). That reflects practice, not a report-card mark: the teacher decides the mark.

Source: Texas Education Agency (TEA)

Sample questions

A taste of this unit. In the app, questions change every time and get easier or harder to match your child.

  1. Question 1

    What does it mean when a species becomes extinct?

    • It moves to a new habitat
    • No living members of the species remain
    • It becomes common

  2. Question 2

    A pond, a forest and a wetland near each other show diversity of…

    • habitats and communities
    • genes in one species
    • only insects

  3. Question 3

    What is a habitat?

    • A kind of food
    • The place where an organism finds food, water and shelter
    • A weather forecast

  4. Question 4

    What do decomposers such as fungi do?

    • Hunt prey
    • Break down dead matter and return nutrients to the soil
    • Make food from sunlight

  5. Question 5

    What is biodiversity?

    • The variety of life on Earth
    • The size of a forest
    • The number of people in a city

  6. Question 6

    Birds build nests in a tree without hurting it. The birds benefit and the tree is unaffected. This is called…

    • mutualism
    • parasitism
    • commensalism

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