The Circle Of Life

This lesson is designed to build students’ competencies in the following skills:

• creative thinking
• critical thinking
• communication
• community engagement

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content description:

Year 7, Science

• Students learn to use models, including food webs, to represent matter and energy flow in ecosystems and predict the impact of changing abiotic and biotic factors on populations (AC9S7U02)

Relevant parts of Year 7 achievement standards: Students represent flows of matter and energy in ecosystems and predict the effects of environmental changes.

NSW Syllabus outcomes:

A student

• describes the role, structure and function of a range of living systems and their components (SC4-LIV-01)

General capabilities: Critical and Creative Thinking 

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability 

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium - lead students in food web model activity and class discussion, and support students in poster-making task.

UN SDG 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

• Target 15.5: Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species.

• device to share video
• poster-making materials
• Poster Rubric

Since Disney released The Lion King, in 1994 and the world fell in love with its story of adventure, friendship, and family on the savanna, Africa has lost half of its lions.

In 2019, Disney released the groundbreaking live-action adaptation of The Lion King and teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Network’s Lion Recovery Fund and its partners to help bring back lions in the wild. Through this collaboration, Disney and the Wildlife Conservation Network’s Lion Recovery Fund encouraged audiences to “Protect the Pride,” urging fans and wildlife lovers around the world to participate in the conservation of lions and their habitats and help support local people who live alongside lions.

Now, five years later, with the release of Mufasa: The Lion King in theatres on December 19, Disney and the Lion Recovery Fund are teaming up again to continue efforts to Protect the Pride, celebrate successes to date, and grow hope for a future where lions and people thrive.

Find out more about how you can Protect the Pride here (disney.com.au/mufasa-the-lion-king-protect-the-pride).

Cool.org would like to extend our thanks to the Lion Recovery Fund and the Zambian Carnivore Programme (zambiacarnivores.org/programme) for their contribution of data, imagery and stories from the field to bring these resources to life. The Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP) is a Zambian-registered non-profit organisation dedicated to conserving large carnivores and the ecosystems they reside in through a combination of conservation science, conservation actions, and a comprehensive education and capacity-building effort. We would particularly like to thank PhD candidates Anna Kusler and Johnathan Reyes de Merkle and wish them the best of luck with their continued research.

What Makes a Species ‘Threatened’? Teaching Biodiversity and Species Protection

Quick summary: Learn about biodiversity and threatened species with Ecologist Thomas Nixon. You will learn what biodiversity is and how it is regulated in Australia, and you will look at some specific case studies that show what is being done across the country to protect our unique biodiversity.