Ecosystems & Food Chains

In my county, 3rd graders used to have to take SOLs (end of year standardized tests) in science and social studies, however, they have done away with those tests and replaced them with "performance tasks". The performance tasks are basically interactive projects that require students to apply/demonstrate knowledge from a specific content unit. We did not have a lot of time for our Ecosystems unit this year, so I planned three days of instruction and then we spent three or four days working on the performance task.

Day 1: Introduction to Ecosystems
Before we dove in to reading and watching videos about ecosystems, we talked about what living and nonliving things are and named some of each that are in our classroom. After that, students watched the Brainpop video Ecosystems and did some research in their Science Fusion textbooks and online to complete the worksheet pictured below.

Day 2: Food Chains
We started by talking about what living things need in order to survive and what plants and animals do to meet their basic needs. Next, we watched the Brainpop Junior video Food Chain and, again, did some research in our textbooks and online to complete the Food Chains page below.

Day 3: Environmental Changes Affect Living Things
On this day we talked about how both living and nonliving things can affect the environment and how, when the environment changes, it affects every living thing that is a part of it. We read in our Science Fusion books about how nonliving things (storms, fires, floods, and droughts) can cause have both positive and negative effects on ecosystems and how living things (plants, animals, and humans) can as well. After reading and discussing, students went back and filled out two pages of causes and effects in environments pictured below.

Performance Task:
For the first quarter, our science performance task was to create a stylized food chain. This project was inspired by a blog post by A Faithful Attempt who was inspired by the pictures below from Sanctuary Magazine.

Disclaimer: This project was VERY challenging for 3rd graders and I would not recommend it, but we were required to do it, so we did our best. To make this more age-appropriate next time, I would have students use the same pages to do research, but create a food chain poster picturing the animals in the food chain in their ecosystem with arrows from one consumer to the next to the original producer.

Day 1: Planning
Students selected a type of ecosystem, a specific ecosystem, and did some research to figure out which animals and plants were a part of the ecosystem that they selected.

Day 2: Research
Students researched the animals that they listed yesterday to figure out what each one eats and what eats it and tried to find food chains within the ecosystems that they chose.

(I made a slide with QR codes for the sites that I wanted my class to use for research & they just used their iPads to scan the codes and go directly to the websites).

Days 3, 4, and 5 for some: Drawing, tracing, cutting, and gluing.
I made templates for the mouth sizes so my students could trace them and create their own animal heads around them. I ended up not using the templates myself, but almost all of my students did.

 

Here is my finished project:

And here are some of the kids' projects:

If you would like to use any of the worksheets that I shared in this post, you can purchase them from my TPT store here or by clicking on the picture below.