Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning all about cycles: animal life cycles, plant life cycles, seasons, and the phases of the moon (SOL3.8). Today students in Ms. Ambrose’s class used a website called Loopy to demonstrate how one of these cycles works. First we reviewed the steps in each cycle and pointed out that most of them have four parts. The students could choose which cycle they wanted to illustrate. I explained that a cycle is kind of like a circle because it continues around and around. Then we went to Loopy and I showed them how to create each step of the cycle by drawing circles and labeling them. The students could also change the colors of each circle. Next, we drew arrows to show the order and relationships between each step. We discussed why the order was important. Could the steps happen out of order? The way Loopy works is you click up or down arrows in each circle and see how having more or less of that part influences the other parts (it was designed to study simulations). So it illustrates life cycles best. If there are more eggs there will be more butterflies or frogs, but if the number of eggs goes down, so does the number of adults. You can change the relationships, too, by making the arrows positive or negative. That would be great for illustrating food chains and food webs (if there are more predators, there would be less prey – a negative relationship, but if there are more prey, there would be more predators – a positive relationship). When we were finished, we published our Loopy projects, and it provided a link to shorten with Bit.ly. We shared our links on Schoology, but you can see them all here.
