Ecosystem webbing
This simple activity can help to illustrate how plants and animals function together in a balanced web of life.
Learning objectives:
- Learn how plants and animals depend on each other
- Understand how a change in environment can pose dangers
- Learn about food chains and introduction to the words producers, predators and prey
- Understand that plants make their own food and that animals get nutrition from what they eat
Curriculum links:
- Science: Construct and interpret food chains, identifying producers, predators, and prey; recognize how environmental changes impact living things
- Geography: Describe and understand key aspects of physical geography, including biomes and vegetation belts
- PSHE: Develop understanding of the wider world and the interdependence of communities within it
Key vocabulary
Preparation and equipment
Preparation
- Some previous discussion of different animal’s diets. This could link to looking at the different functions of teeth
- Make picture cards of animals and plants, discuss how the children think they are linked
Equipment
- A ball of string
- Pictures of animals, plants, rocks and water for inspiration
Step by step
- Ask your group to form a circle with the leader inside holding a ball of string
- Ask a group member to volunteer the name of a plant they know and give them the end of the string
- Pose the question - who would eat this plant? Give the ball of string to the child who answers correctly (you should now have two group members connected with the string)
- Ask who would like to eat the animal or insect and join on the next child by giving them the ball of string
- Continue until the whole group is joined with the string and you have made an ecosystem
Hints and tips
- Suggest different plants, insects and animals to be considered
- To extend this activity you can study specific ecosytems and food chains in certain areas such as; in soil, underground, rivers, ponds, sea, rain forests, woodland, deserts, plains, sky or air
Further learning
- Make up a story to necessitate the removal of one member of the web (perhaps a tree falls due to flooding or is cut down for building works)
- When it falls the tree tugs on the string and anyone who feels it will be effected, so they need to tug the string as well
- Eventually every member of the ecosystem will be effected
- Try to introduce the removal of plants, insects or animals for a range of different reasons such as; disease, flooding, drought, larger predator population etc