Food Chain: Who Eats Whom, Wren and Sitka Nature Investigation, Grades 3-5
The arrow points toward the eater, because the arrow shows where the energy went, not who is doing the eating. Half the food chain worksheets in the world get that backwards, and your child will be able to say why it matters.
By the end of this
- Your child can draw a food chain with the arrows pointing the right way, and say why they point at the eater
Your child is ready for this if they
- Reads a short paragraph without help
- Writes a sentence in their own words
- Will go outside and look at something for five minutes
That list matters more than the age we printed on it. You know which of the two is true of your child.
A food chain is a way of drawing where energy goes. The arrows point in the direction the energy travels, which trips people up. The arrow goes from the eaten to the eater.
It starts with producers. Plants make their own food from sunlight, so nothing had to be eaten for them to live.
Then come consumers. A plant eater is a herbivore. A meat eater is a carnivore. An animal that eats both is an omnivore.
At the end come decomposers. Fungi, bacteria, and some insects break down what is left and return it to the soil, where plants use it again.
Energy is lost at every step, mostly as heat. That is why there are always far more plants than plant eaters, and far more plant eaters than predators.
What is inside
- 01Who Eats Whom — the teaching page
- 02Who Eats Whom — the work page, answerable from the teaching page
- 03Take it outside: Find one producer, one consumer, and one decomposer within sight of each other.
Standards alignment, for a portfolio or a state filing
2 alignments. Copy what your state asks for and ignore the rest — this is here for the paperwork, not for the teaching.
| Framework | Code | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| NGSS | 5-LS2-1 | |
| NGSS | 5-PS3-1 |