[Nat]

any cool ideas to help teach the food chain to grade 4 students?

nat

[Lighthouse]

what i do is that everyone is in a circle wearing a name tag of an organsim in a certain envionment and they throw the ball of string to the organism they eat. at the end you cut one line of the string and it shows how the food web breaks when one animal is affected.

this is all i have let me know if you come up with something new

[SusanTeach]

If your school does "Thinking Maps", you can do a tree map to classify the different levels of a food chain - give examples of each. Then you can have several pictures of animals, and divide the class into groups. Give each group 4 animals and let them figure out what order of the food chain they are. Then give them 4 strips of paper - make into a paper chain. Write each animal's name (and/or glue picture on) on each piece of the chain. After each group presents theirs to the class, let them tape them to the board. Then discuss what a web is - and how it compares (that's a benchmark for us in our state in 4th grade). You can do it easiest by running a piece of yarn through one loop of a chain, and show how that animal can "overlap" into another food chain - thus creating a web.

[teachjam]

http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/

Go to this site and click on Science. Under that, land and environments and food chain will pop up. This great site has lessons, power pts, and hand out sheets. A great site.
teachjam

I used the 4 oz dixie cups for Phytoplankton, 8 oz for Zooplankton, 12 oz for a small fish, and 16 oz for tuna fish. I explained also that since the child was holding it they were they fifth link in the chain. You can obviously use this idea for any food chain you want and you can make it as long as you want if you can continue to find larger cups.