Throwing Shade Balls

Investigate mysterious shade balls and the role they play in the cycling of matter and energy through ecosystems. Throwing Shade Balls can help any young biologist uncover how materials flow through ecosystems.

This kit allows your student to study the impacts of shade balls on organism growth, model how matter and energy flow through ecosystems using food chains and food webs, and investigate the work of decomposers and detritivores.

Throwing Shade Balls is an Accelerate level kit that includes a full-color student workbook and a detailed teacher guide, with step-by-step instructions for both hands-on and reading-based activities designed to engage students in matter and energy flow through ecosystems. Both teacher and student will be able to open the box and start within minutes, and the kit will provide over 9 hours of engaging learning.

In this kit, the student will partake in these engaging learning activities:

1. Find out what a shade ball is.
2. Test the impact of shade balls on plants. 
3. Watch as microscopic organisms break down food.
4. Determine how much energy passes from one trophic level to the next.
5. See how food chains are interconnected as food webs.

Use Eye Spy to answer questions such as:

• What is a shade ball?
• How does matter and energy flow through ecosystems?
• How does decomposition work?
• What do organisms eat?
• How do plants obtain energy from sunlight?

The Eye Spy biology curriculum kit is a part of the Science Unlocked Accelerate series and is recommended for elementary and middle school students in grades 5-7.

Interested in learning more? Check out our Student Workbook Sample and Teacher Guide Sample!  

More Information

• Both "Fin-tastic Addition" and "Totally Top-Notch Terrarium" in the extension activities in Activity 6 reference Activity 3, but should reference Activity 2 instead. The ecosystems are the small bowls with the shade balls blocking varying amounts of light from the plants growing underneath.
• Safety Information (SDS)

This kit contains:

• 3 aluminum pie plates
• Black permanent marker
• 7 sheets of card stock
• 9 chenille stems, yellow
• 4 crackers
• 4 crayons
• Foam beads
• Invisible tape with dispenser
• 2 bags of peat moss
• Plastic graduated cup
• Poly bag, 9 X 14"
• Leaf lettuce seeds
• 2 packs of beads
• 4 zip-close bags, 6 X 9"
• 2 zip-close bags, 3 X 5"

• Scissors 
• Water

• Learning outcome: How Matter and Energy Move Throughout Ecosystems
• NGSS science standards alignment

• 3-LS4-4 Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.

• 5-LS2-1 Develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment.

• 5-PS3-1 Use models to describe that energy in animals’ food (used for body repair, growth, motion, and to maintain body warmth) was once energy from the sun.

• MS-LS2-1 Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.