Fire ants and Lizards: Reflection

Encouraging students to reflect, and support their views in essential to higher order thinking. The following video is sure to stir up some ideas. It is a video on fire ant and lizard interaction. Claims are made. Do you feel the claims are supported? Why or why not? Each student can decide for him- or her- self and students can then support the opinions they have obtained with literature citations, experimentation, and discussions. Students may obtain different answers. What is important is that they each take time to reflect, think, study, research, experiment and draw a conclusion they are comfortable with. Students are at different levels and bring different knowledge and value systems into classes. An open-ended exercise like this helps each student grow from where he or she is. The video has something for each of us to learn. Remember, we can all remind ourselves to keep ourselves current by periodically reviewing new information as it is learned. Then, we repeat the steps just taken here of reflecting and evaluating and drawing conclusions, anew.



Can you investigate and find out more about fire ants? About lizards? What type of lizard is that? How can you find out?

Here is a link on Eastern Fence lizards:
http://www.uga.edu/srelherp/lizards/sceund.htm

Wikipedia link on Western Fence Lizards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_fence_lizard

Here is the portal to more information on lizards:
http://www.nbii.gov/portal/community/Communities/Plants,_Animals_&_Other_Organisms/Reptiles/Reptile_Species/Lizards/

These are a good place to start. But, Remember to use your Reach Readtng TM skills to bridge uo to the refereed journal articles. Use HOT skills (higher order thinking skills) to enhance your learning on this (and other) topic(s).
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