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Activity

Food Chain Activities

Curated and Reviewed by Lesson Planet
This Food Chain Activities activity also includes:

Transform young biologists into grasshoppers, lizards, and hawks as you teach them about food chains in an interactive life science simulation. Working collaboratively to act out three different scenarios involving these creatures, children gain an appreciation for the interdependent relationships between the producers and consumers in an ecosystem.

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CCSS: Adaptable
Concepts
food chains, food webs, ecosystems, interdependency, predator-prey relationships, predators, prey, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, consumers, producers, heterotrophs, autotrophs, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers
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Additional Tags
science
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Instructional Ideas
  • Include this activity as part of an upper-elementary unit on ecosystems
  • Adapt this activity to teach about different ecosystems by changing the animals involved
  • Use the "Food Web Evaluation" worksheet to assess student learning after completing the activity
Classroom Considerations
  • Lesson calls for access to a large open space, either inside or outdoors, so be sure to plan accordingly
  • Have students switch the roles they play in each simulation to be fair and avoid any potential conflicts
  • Make clean-up a little easier by using something besides popcorn to represent grass
Pros
  • A teacher's guide is provided that includes a step-by-step procedure for performing this activity
  • Worksheets are included for recording predictions and observations for each of the three simulations
  • Includes a diagram that clearly depicts the relationships between producers and consumers in ecosystems
Cons
  • None