Ecosystems and food webs
Producers, consumers and decomposers, and how a change ripples through a food web.
Lessons
Food Webs: Who Eats Whom?
Where a plant's food comes from, what happens when the wolves disappear, who cleans up, and how much life hides under a log. Four lessons on how energy and matter move through living things.
Survival Clues: Fossils, Groups and Changing Habitats
Four no-materials lessons on what helps living things survive: reading fossil cards from Antarctica to the Himalaya to work out what places were like long ago, a predator-and-prey game on why animals live in groups, a camouflage hunt on printed bark and sand, and case files on what happens when a habitat changes. Everything runs on printed sheets.
Ecosystems and Biomes: Who Depends on Whom
Real wolf and moose counts from Isle Royale, a sixteen-card sort of competitors, predators, parasites and partners, six real climate graphs to match to their biomes, and a sea wall against a salt marsh. Four print-and-go lessons on populations, interactions, biomes and the services ecosystems give us.
Who Eats What? Food Chains and Helpers
What does a rabbit need, and what does a sunflower need? Children sort picture cards by what living things need, build food chains on the floor from the sun to a fox, and play bees carrying pollen between paper flowers. Everything prints: no materials to buy.
Online practice
- Where plant matter comes from Grade 5
- Food webs and energy flow Grade 5
- Decomposers and cycles of matter Grade 5
Free tools
Predator and Prey
Run a simulated meadow of hares and lynx. Change birth and hunting rates and watch the two populations rise and fall on a live graph.
Food Web Builder
Build a food web for a forest, pond or ocean by drawing arrows from food to eater. Then remove one species and see which others are affected.