Making the Connection
Coastal Ecology—Making the Connection
Summary: Students explore food chains and food webs to discover interconnecting relationships among organisms in an ecosystem.
Concepts to teach: Food webs, different ecosystems
Goals: Students will learn about ecological relationships by constructing a simple food chain or food web.
Standards:
6.2L.2,7.2L.2
Specific Objectives:
- Describe the difference between various roles in the food chain.
- Display the connections between various creatures in the food chain.
- Demonstrate the effects of outside influences on food chains and ecosystems.
Activity Links and Resources:
- Making the Connection adapted from Michigan Sea Grant‘s Project FLOW
- The 550-page Stream Scene curriculum is available in .pdf format on the ODFW website, and covers a variety of watershed topics.
- The chapter Aquatic Organisms begins with background information about healthy diversified stream ecosystems and food chains, p. 307
- Food Chain descriptions and games
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- Food Chain Quiz—This is a good review of concepts in a fun format from the BBC.
- Food Chain Game—An interactive animated drag and drop game from sheppardsoftware.com
- Food Web Interactive from eduweb.com—Describes components of pond food chain and webs, and finishes with an experiment to see what happens changes are made to complex food webs.
Assessment:
- Students look at multiple food chains or webs from different ecological systems and talk about the relationships depicted.
