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Woodland food chain game

Summary

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Teacher guidance and printable cards for a classroom activity on woodland food chains and food webs. Pupils take on roles as plants, herbivores, carnivores, and detritivores, using string or energy tokens to show who eats whom and how energy moves from the sun through living organisms and dead material. The activity is offered at basic, intermediate, and advanced levels, introducing terms such as predator, prey, producer, consumer, omnivore, and detritivore. Suggested games include forming simple chains, collecting energy only from valid food sources, building concentric “rings” to model a food web, and testing what happens when a species is removed. An optional extension models pollution and bioaccumulation using coloured tokens. Example woodland chains are provided (for example, bluebells–aphid–ladybird and leaves–caterpillar–blue tit–sparrowhawk), along with role cards for organisms and food sources.
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Woodland

Food

Chains

Woodland Food Chains

Teacher’s notes

This activity can be run with varying degrees of complexity depending on the age and ability of your pupils.

For all versions, each child is given an animal character, e.g. print as a sticker/ on string.

You may also need lots of string, or tokens that represent energy that can be passed around/ along string/ from hand to hand.

Basic: Who eats who?

Pupils need to find another character they might eat, or that might eat them.

Move around the room until you are in a group of 3 or 4.

Give each plant a ball/star/object representing energy. Roleplaying eating and passing the energy on.

Introduce the vocabulary,

  • predator, prey OR
  • producer, consumer, secondary consumer

Basic: Who eats what?

Pupils find someone who eats the same thing as them.

Introduce the vocabulary

  • producer, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, detritivore (eats/ gains their energy from dead material e.g. beetle, fungus)

Intermediate: Food chain game

Pupils are all given a role.

Plants and dead wood are sited around the room with a supply of pegs, tags or tokens (energy).

Pupils can only take tokens from a creature they would eat. Gradually introduce secondary and tertiary consumers into the game. Who ends up with all the energy?

This can be simplified by using “characters” from just one food chain, or by only having three layers e.g. bluebells, aphids, ladybirds.

If using multi-coloured tokens and pegs, why not reveal a secret poison, that only acts when a character has three or more tokens of that colour (bio accumulation of chemicals, e.g. slug pellets kill hedgehogs)

Advanced: Rings game

Using the rings diagram, or a large version chalked on the playground floor.

Ask pupils to arrange themselves with the sun at the centre, and producers and consumers in concentric rings working outwards, linking up to the character the eat/ are eaten by. They will soon discover that they need to create loop back into the middle because of the detritivores!

What happens if one character is removed? E.g. a tree, the sun? Lay down if you are dead.

Nb. It is sometimes difficult to see the patterns from the inside of the circle. Get one or two pupils to be directors, or video the others, then play it back so pupils can be part of the patter and then look at it from the outside.

Advanced: create your own food chain game and rules!

Asking pupils to create their own game is great for teamwork and negotiating. It shows which pupils have understood the flow of energy and provides a good chance to reflect on “what happens in reality”. E.g. animals need to use up energy to move around at different speeds, where does this energy go? How much time do animals have to spend eating? However, you will need a lot of tokens to make these versions work!

Acorns Pig
Holly Pony
Grass Rabbit Fox
Foxgloves Bee Honey buzzard
Dead leaves Worm Hedgehog
Seeds Mouse Owl
Berries Blackbird Goshawk
Dead wood Stag beetle Badger
Leaves Moth Bat
Dead wood Mushrooms Deer
Bluebells Aphid Ladybird
Dead wood Fly Spider Robin
Leaves Caterpillar Blue tit Sparrowhawk

Grass
Acorns

Moth
Bat

Caterpillar
Badger

Fly
Deer

Hedgehog
Goshawk

Image: RSPB

Dead leaves
Worm

Stag beetle
Ladybird

Leaves
Mouse

Rabbit
Owl

Spider
Blackbird

Image: RSPB

Berries
Seeds

Bee
Bluebells

Fox
Honey buzzard

Image: RSPB

Pig
Mushrooms

Dead wood
Dead wood

Leaves
Dead wood

Blue tit
Foxgloves

Image: RSPB

Robin
Sparrowhawk

Image: RSPB

Image: RSPB

Pony
Holly

Sun
Aphid

Sun
Plants
Herbivores
Carnivores
Dead Plants
Detritivores
Food chains (webs)

Students to each (or in pairs) put around their necks a food chain card (picture).

Sit the sun in the middle of the room.

Next get all the plants to sit around the sun in a circle.

Follow this up with herbivores and then carnivores in their correct ring, near to the plant/animal they might eat.

Additional element - add in/separate the dead plants.

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