Walking Up a Food Chain
Together we will construct a live food chain as your students meet a raptor, reptile, amphibian, arachnid, and insect. Along the way we discuss how these animals' lives are connected and learn about the delicate balance that allows them to survive both individually and together as wildlife who share a habitat.
Experience live, interactive programs right in your classroom! Our educators use videoconferencing technology to share science, nature and math activities with your students, engaging them in a dynamic, hands-on learning experience.
Cost: $175
To Register: We book our Distance Learning programs through the Center for Interactive Learning & Collaboration (CILC). Book your program, today!
Available: November-February (Tuesdays only)
We provide:
A kit with materials for interactive experiments for 30 students.
A Teacher’s Guide to prepare you, your classroom, and your students before the experience.
Extension activities and resources for further exploration.
Grade Level: K-5
Duration: 50 minutes
Group Size: 30 students
Set up: You can use H.323 videoconferencing system or a computer with Zoom, a webcam, speakers, and microphone.
Next Generation Science Standards
Students participating in this program will explore science content as stated in the Disciplinary Core Ideas. They will engage in science and engineering practices as they plan and conduct investigations to answer questions regarding the food chain.
ESS2.E: Biogeology
Plants and animals can change their environment.
ESS3.A: Natural Resources
Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Humans use natural resources for everything they do.
LS1.A: Structure and Function
All organisms have external parts. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek, find, and take in food, water and air.
Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction.
LS1.B: Growth and Development of Organisms
Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.
LS1.C: Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms
All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals.
LS1.D: Information Processing
Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Plants also respond to some external inputs.
Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal’s brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.
LS2.A: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems
Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.
In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction.
Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.
Similarly, predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and nonliving, are shared.
LS2.B: Cycle of Matter and Energy Transfer in Ecosystems
Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.
LS2.C: Ecosystem Dynamics, Functioning, and Resilience
Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations.
LS3.A: Inheritance of Traits
Young animals are very much, but not exactly, like their parents. Plants also are very much, but not exactly, like their parents.
LS3.B: Variation of Traits
Individuals of the same kind of plant or animal are recognizable as similar but can also vary in many ways.
LS4.D: Biodiversity and Humans
There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.