Lesson 1: There's A Lot In This Spoonful!

SUBJECT: Language Arts, Music, Dance, Art

OBJECTIVE: Students will learn about the plant and animal life in a teaspoonful of soil, most of which is invisible to our naked eyes.

EVALUATION: Students will be able to express knowledge of, and appreciation for, the plant and animal life in the soil.

BACKGROUND FOR TEACHERS:

The soil is the home of innumerable kinds of plant and animal life that range in size from those too small to be seen without a powerful microscope, to large ones such as earthworms.

The microscopic life includes bacteria, protozoa, some fungi and algae. There can be 1 to 4 billion one-celled bacteria per gram of soil, or 8,000 to 1 million fungi. Soil algae may run as high as 100,000 per gram under favorable conditions.

Animal life in the soil includes nematodes, and larger animals such as rodents, earthworms, ants, snails, spiders, mites and various other worms and insects.

Earthworms are an important group of the larger animals. The earthworms in an acre of soil pass several tons of soil through their bodies each year, and in so doing, make certain nutrients available to plants. Burrows left by earthworms let water and air move more freely through the soil. The number of earthworms may range from a few hundred to more than a million per acre.

STUDENT ACTIVITIES:

1. Ask students to read the story Ann Learns to Plow, paying close attention to the paragraph where she talks about gulls finding worms in the soil, and also the one where she says, "In every handful of soil are millions of tiny plants and animals, so small only a microscope could make them visible.Soil is a busy place!"

2. Then introduce a small box to the students, saying, "This box contains soil, one of the most important things on earth." Use a teaspoon to remove a scoop of soil from the box. Show them pictures of the microscopic (and other) life in the soil, Example 1, and read one of the following:

"Take just the top inch of soil, the world squirming right under my palms. In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found 'an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles, and various numbers of 12 other forms.' Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae-in a mere teaspoonful of soil."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York; Bantam Books, Inc. 1974)

BLACK ENERGY

Life is seething in this soil
which has been millions of years
in the making.
It has been forever
in the making.

A mingling of untold billions of bodies
of plants and animals:
grasses of this prairie
buffalo and antelope grazing down
into roots and back again
into the sun.
Birds and insects, their wings still hum
in this soil.

And this swarm drinks
sunlight and rain,
and rises again
into corn and bean
and flesh and bone.

The quick bodies of animals and men
risen from this black energy.

Joe Paddock, Land Stewardship Project materials, Stillwater, MN 55082

3. Then ask students to complete one or more of the following:

• Write a story in which they ARE one of the life forms living in the soil, and ask them to describe what they smell, feel and taste. Ask them to describe what sounds they hear, and how they spend their days.
• Create a dance of the "squirming" of life under the soil.
• Draw or paint a picture of a teaspoonful of soil, and all the plant and animal life it holds.
• Write a poem about the hundreds, thousands, millions of years it takes to create soil from rock, plants and animals. Then imagine what the future brings.
• Write and perform a play, in which the characters are the different life forms in the soil-plant and animal.
• Build a model of a soil "community," including all the life forms that make the soil their home, complete with their "houses, roads, and gathering places." Use Example 2.

Last reviewed May 7, 2004