Explain that animals, including humans, cannot make their own food and that when animals eat plants or other animals, the energy stored in the food source is passed to them.
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Description |
Producer Consumer Reading |
Students will learn about energy transfer between organisms, and understand the different roles that organisms can hold in a food web. They will use cards to create food webs as groups, then combine all their food webs into one large ecosystem.
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Food Chain Repair | In this STEM lesson, students will build a food chain with Florida organisms and keep the energy "point level" within a desired range. There will then be some scenarios that will be placed on the food chain and student engineers will try to keep their food chain in tact. |
Plants: To Eat or Not to Eat | In this lesson, students will explore the structure of plants in ways never before. Through observations about plant parts related to everyday food, students will gain a further understanding of humans and plants being interdependent. This lesson integrates Science, Reading, Writing and even some Math practices if choosing to complete the extension activities. |
Dramatic Food Chains | This fun lesson gives students the chance to "act out" food chains. By really putting themselves into food chains, students will better understand the transfer of energy through the food chain, as well as understand that the sun is the primary source of energy in a food chain. This lesson ends with students constructing their own food chains, and writing an explanatory paragraph to explain the flow of energy through the food chain they constructed. |
Predator and Prey | In this lesson the students will learn about a predator/prey relationship. They will learn about the role that plants and animals play in their ecosystem and what each role is called. The students will also learn about the limiting factors each ecosystem possesses that prevent any species population from becoming too large. |
Food Webs | In this activity about food webs, students learn that producers make all of the molecules they need from simple substances and energy from the sun, other living things depend on producers for food, and living things that must eat other organisms as food are known as consumers. Food webs show all of the various interactions among producers and consumers in an ecosystem. Following an introduction to the content, students are divided into six groups and given a set of six cards, each of which represents a producer or consumer, unique to one of six different ecosystems. From the set of cards, students identify the producers and consumers, discuss who might eat whom, and construct an illustration of the possible food web configurations. |