How to Teach Food Chains and Food Webs

Food chains and food webs are one of those topics introduced during elementary school that we expand upon during middle school. Your students will have some background knowledge. You can use this background knowledge to deepen their understanding.

Reviewing Food Chains and Food Webs

Your students most likely already learned about this topic, but you will want to review them. I have an information text and activity set that would be incredibly helpful.

You can also show students videos. While information texts are helpful because students can read through them at their own pace and refer back to them as necessary, videos are extremely engaging and allow every student to comprehend the material being shared. There is room for both videos and information texts in your science classroom!

The only thing more engaging than videos are activities. I found this super fun food web activity at B-Inspired Mama. Kids have a board with pictures of plants and animals tacked to it. Then, they use rubber bands to connect the plants and animals to show a food web.

Once you have reviewed, you can capture the big ideas in an anchor chart to display in the classroom. You can use these pictures as a guide for your anchor chart.

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Energy Pyramids

Now that your students have reviewed, it is time to broaden their knowledge by introducing energy pyramids. Energy pyramids show how the amount of available energy changes as it moves up through the food chain. The bottoms layers of the pyramid have more available energy than the top layers. As a result, we have fewer predators than prey in food chains. For example, while eight billion humans sounds like a lot, there are nearly twenty-six billion chickens living on Earth right now. Bacteria, at the bottom of the food chain, has a population of 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!

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Energy from the Sun

Have you taught energy yet? If not, this is the time to introduce your students to electromagnetic energy, also known as sunlight. All of the plants on Earth get the energy they use to make glucose from sunlight. The glucose of plants is the backbone of food chains. Physical and life science overlap in plants, and this is the perfect opportunity to show this connection to your students.

My information text also introduces energy pyramids and explains the importance of energy from the sun to life on Earth.

Make Food Chains and Food Webs Fun!

This is a fun topic that your students have experience with. Take this opportunity to help all of your students feel successful in science. Their confidence will help them make empowered choices for the rest of the year. This is also an opportunity to bring food into the classroom. Those are always my favorite days!

I haven’t thought of a snack to represent a plant yet (please share if you have an idea!), but crushed Oreos make great dirt full of bacteria. Then, you can use gummy worms to represent real worms, goldfish to represent fish, and animal crackers to represent the predators of fish. You have just made a delicious food chain! You can use your food day to introduce your unit or as a celebration after the test.

Speaking of the test, the best way for students to learn new information is through repeated practice, and the easiest way to get in tons of repeated practice is using flashcards. My flashcard set on interdependence will help your students review a variety of ecological relationships!

Are You Teaching Another Science Topic?

I am working on creating more science units so that every science teacher can get exactly what he or she needs for her students. You can also read about how I use brain science to teach other science topics on my blog. Click the pictures below to learn more.

Coming soon!

#ecology #energypyramid