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Hi Ruth,
One activity that was inspired from an NSTA online resource (I have attached the book chapter) to be very effective and engaging on teaching the concept of the Interdependence of Life, and more specifically food webs, is using index cards, writing names of organisms in a select ecosytems, and connecting them by a ball of yarn to symbolize relationships, or interactions within a food web. The activity is furthered detailed and expanded in a 5E lesson plan on Ecology that I wrote for a science education course; here is an excerpt of it from the document I am attaching, that I hope will help! (The lesson plan activity uses a food web in a marine ecosystem. the standards I used for this lesson plan are: NGSS Content Standards: 3-LS4-3- Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems- Students who demonstrate understanding can: Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.)
Engagement:
Ask the students if they live at home with their family. Call on a few students to list the members in their family who they live with. Then ask the participants who cooks for the family. Raise the following question: “What if suddenly that member in the family disappeared?” If students reply that their parents take them to restaurants to eat, ask “What if the restaurant suddenly ran out of food?” Then ask who in their family drives them around. Follow-up with: “Now what if that member was gone?” Close the discussion by telling them to imagine a safari, where hundreds of species of animals live, including lions, zebras, and giraffes. Then ask “Now what would happen if all the lions in the safari jungle died off?” Receive a couple of guesses, and transition to the next activity.
Exploration:
Food Chain Activity: Choose 6 volunteers who would like to participate in the next activity. Give each volunteer one index card, and tell them that each will play one part in an ecosystem. Write the 5 parts on the board: sun, phytoplankton, zooplankton, herring, bass, and shark. Next to each term, describe each abiotic and biotic factor, and what organisms require what. By the end, the students should know that phytoplankton require the sun to produce energy, that zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, herring on zooplankton, bass on herring, and shark on bass. Provide the terms with images for visual reference. Make sure the volunteers write their assigned terms on their index cards. Then hole punch the index cards, creating two holes at the upper corners of the index cards. Take around 20 inches of some yarn and bring the string through each hole, tying the ends at the hole. The end product should be a necklace with a hanging index card. Now call the volunteers to the front of the classroom, and randomize their order, while wearing the index cards hanging from the neck. The volunteers are not allowed to move. Then begin asking the class questions regarding the relationships between the organisms and sun: “Which organism needs the sun?” The volunteer wearing “phytoplankton” should be identified. Now take the remaining ball of yarn, and tell the volunteer wearing “sun” to hold onto the end of the yarn (and not let go), while the ball passes through the necklace of “phytoplankton.” Then ask: “Which organism relies on phytoplankton for food?” Zooplankton should be identified. The ball now should be passed through the necklace of the student with “zooplankton.” When asked which organism eats zooplankton, the yarn will be passed through “herring.” The same process is done through bass (which eats the herring). For the final role, the ball of yarn will pass through “shark.” The yarn should then be tied on the necklace yarn of the “shark” volunteer. The end product of this activity should show a complex network of yarn interconnecting the sun and every animal together.
Explanation:
By the end of the food chain activity, the students should observe a complex network of yarn connecting all the volunteers together. Ask the “sun” volunteer to tug on the yarn that he or she is holding. The whole class should see all the index cards move as a result of the tug from just the “sun” volunteer. Ask the class what that might mean. The teacher should then explicate that all the animals are part of a food chain in which every organism relies on the sun, as well as on each other. The term food chain should be discussed as a diagram to explain how energy is transferred between living things in an environment (make a disclaimer though, that the sun is not part of the food chain because it is not a living thing, but it is needed by all the living things in the food chain). The teacher should go back to the online game “Fish Food” and tie that activity with the food chain activity. In both cases, the fish depended on other fish for food. Moreover, there are different levels to the chain
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