Resources: Card/paper, scissors, sticky tape, coloured pens/pencils and a glue stick. You may prefer to provide the children with animal pictures to cut out instead.
Core Handout (2): Space for the children to draw and label a food chain.
Challenge Handout (4): Additional space for the children to explain what is happening in their food chain and then suggest what would happen if there was no producer and how that might affect the rest of the food chain.
Enquiry Skill - Recording data, results and findings
Using tables, a variety of graphs, labelled diagrams and models to record observations, measurements, results and findings.
Enquiry Approach - Research
Using information from a variety of sources to answer scientific questions.
Think about the animals the children researched in the previous session - what did they eat? Thinking back to previous learning in Year 1, can they remember what each of these terms means - herbivore, carnivore and omnivore?
Use the presentation slides to explain the idea of a food chain; e.g. grass to cow to human. The children should use their knowledge of what animals eat to show how a food chain works.
Expert Film: Mike Linley, a zoologist, visits Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens and talks about the food chain.
Firstly, ask the children to use the handout to design their food chain by drawing and writing a paragraph to explain their ideas. The children should then make their food chain ‘Russian dolls’ to show their understanding of how a food chain works.
Challenge Task: Ask the children to write an extended paragraph to explain what would happen if the producer were not available.
Gather the children into groups of 3 or 4. Can they create alternative food chains with their ‘Russian dolls’? Demonstrate that one animal might belong to several different food chains.
A food chain is a sequence of organisms, where each organism is the food source of the next in the chain. The energy flow in a food chain is unidirectional, with energy being transferred from lower to higher trophic levels.
The different trophic levels in a food chain include producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and decomposers.
Producers: Plants, algae, and other photosynthetic organisms are the primary producers that convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis.
Primary consumers: Herbivores that feed on the primary producers are known as primary consumers. They are at the second level of the food chain.
Secondary consumers: Carnivores that feed on the herbivores are known as secondary consumers. They are at the third level of the food chain.
Tertiary consumers: Predators that feed on the secondary consumers are known as tertiary consumers. They are at the fourth level of the food chain.
Decomposers: Organisms like fungi and bacteria that break down the waste and dead matter are known as decomposers. They help to recycle the nutrients and energy back into the ecosystem.
An example of a food chain is the following: Grass (producer) -> Rabbit (primary consumer) -> Fox (secondary consumer) -> Eagle (tertiary consumer)
Food chains can be interconnected to form food webs, which depict the complex relationships between organisms in an ecosystem. Understanding food chains and food webs is an important part of studying ecology and the interactions between different species in an ecosystem.
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