Everything you need to teach food chains

Is food chains up next in your curriculum? Most students learn food chains in the elementary grades, so how do you make it interesting and rigorous at the secondary level? Here are some great options:

Take the guessing out of creating food chains and webs! Students will create a food chain and web with 36 given organism cards. Each card has an organism, picture, what it eats, and what it gets eaten by. No more "Miss, what does a skunk eat?" Snag this lesson HERE.

https://ecokids.ca/swf-files/gamesPage/chain_reaction.swf
This website is a great review of food chains. It is pretty basic, but if you have an interactive whiteboard it’s a quick and easy way to have students come up and show you what they already know. While the order of the animals is pretty obvious, students will need to know where to put them based on the directions of the arrows. I also like that the food chains include the sun, so students recognize that the sun is the source of the energy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOvqYypOuo
This is a great youtube video on food chains. It shows a food chain in the everglades, and reviews important vocabulary like herbivore, carnivore, producer, and consumer.

This skull lab is always a hit! I take out the skulls before introducing vocabulary words like herbivore, carnivore, nocturnal, or diurnal. Students will analyze the skulls and make inferences about how the animal lived. They have a really fun time trying to figure out which animals they are too! Don't have skulls handy? Don't worry! I have a great paper version of this lab in my teachers pay teachers store. Check it out here.

Last but not least is a lesson that demonstrates why it is important that trophic levels remain in balance. In this activity, students play the role of grass (producer), rabbit (primary consumer), or a coyote (secondary consumer). Throughout the 5 rounds, students will go around the room and pair up with another student. If they find a prey they get to eat it. If they find another organism of the same species, they reproduce. If they don't eat or get eaten that round, they are out. Students will quickly learn that there needs to be few secondary consumers and a lot of producers for a community to be sustainable. Check it out in my teachers pay teachers store here.

When you make ecology hands on and interactive, students will have a blast. What other activities do you do with your students when teaching food chains? Leave ideas in the comments below!