Food chains and webs

Ages 9 to 12 Read alone or together · about 35 minutes

Read together

Every living thing needs energy. Plants make their own food from sunlight, water and air. They are called producers.

Animals eat plants or other animals. Herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat animals, and omnivores eat both. Decomposers, such as fungi and some bacteria, break down dead things and return nutrients to the soil.

A food chain shows who eats whom. Most animals eat several things, so the chains join into a food web.

Do it

1. Choose a habitat: a rice paddy, a pond, a coral reef or a forest. List ten living things in it.
2. Draw arrows from what is eaten to what eats it. For example: rice plant, grasshopper, frog, snake.
3. Connect your chains to make a web. Stand in a circle and pass a ball of string from each animal to what it eats.
4. What happens if one animal disappears? Remove it and see which strings go slack.

Talk about it

• Where does the energy come from?
• What could happen if too many predators were removed?

For the grown-up

Food webs show how living things depend on one another. This is a good place to talk about caring for creation, since changing one part can affect many others.

Mark as done

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Where this comes from

• NGSS Lead States, Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States (National Academies Press, 2013), performance expectation 5-LS2-1 (develop a model to describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers and the environment)
• National Geographic Society, education resources on food chains and food webs

Written with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed. Please read it before sharing it with a child.