I am a 4th grade teacher in Southeast Missouri.  I created this webquest to correspond with my district's objectives in Science.  I have also tried to correlate it to the Show Me Standards.  Content Standards:  SC3, SC4, SC5.  Process Standards:  1.2, 1.4, 2.3, 2.5, 4.5.

Some background information may need to be given to your students before starting this webquest.  Some terms your students will need to know are:  population, ecosystem, and biome.  I would also have a mini lesson on paraphrasing, so that your students are not plagiarizing copyrited material.  You may want someone from the U.S. Postal Service to come to your class to speak about commemorative stamps -- why they are issued, examples, and the process of selecting what images go onto a commemorative stamp.  You could also make a side journey and study Native American beliefs.

I would also suggest having some trade books handy for your students to use as reference in addition to the Internet.  Here are a few suggestions: Magic School Bus Meets the Rot Squad

There is an online rubric calculator that goes with the scoring guide.  You just type in the score for each team or student and it will calculate total score, average score, and percentage.  You can find it here.

You will probably want to do some assessment in addition to the scoring guide to make sure the students learned the content that is the focus here:  consumers, producers, decomposers.  I have created some Selected Response and Constructed Response items to go with this study.  In my opinion, the mural the team creates can be considered a Performance Event.  The SR items I have put into a quiz on Funbrain (You will have to be registered to take the quiz:  Producers, Consumers, Decomposers).  CR items can be found and printed from here.

Just a note:  I put the water cycle on with the responsibilities of the Rotologist because I thought it was important to the circle of life and that role had the fewest number of questions to cover.  Also, I do not know what a person who studies decomposers is called, so I made up the name Rotologist.  If you know what such a person's title is, please email me and I will change it.