Food chains: who eats whom?

Aims and objectives

These activities focus on food chains as a useful way of demonstrating to pupils that living things in habitats - animals and plants - need each other to survive. They are a basis for the pupils to build up to more complex ideas about ecosystems. 

Curriculum objectives

Pupils should learn:

• to identify the structure of a food chain
• that most food chains start with a green plant (producer)
• that food chains can be used to represent feeding relationships in a habitat. 

Learning outcomes

At the end of this session:

• most pupils will: represent feeding relationships in food chains beginning with a green plant
• some pupils will not have made so much progress and will: know that some animals feed on other animals and some on plants
• some pupils will have progressed further and will also: recognise that green plants are the source of food for all animals.