Georgia S4L1.b
The Standard
Develop simple models to illustrate the flow of energy through a food web/food chain beginning with sunlight and including producers, consumers, and decomposers.
Georgia Standards of Excellence for Science · Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about the roles of organisms and the flow of energy within an ecosystem.
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students build food chains and food webs that trace energy from the Sun to plants, animals, and decomposers. They use arrows to show where energy moves next.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students place organisms in accurate feeding relationships and point arrows from the food source to the organism that eats it. They can explain each organism's role and connect decomposers to dead matter.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may point arrows toward what gets eaten instead of toward the energy receiver. They may think plants get energy from soil or that decomposers eat only dead animals.
How to Assess It
- Give students these labels: Sun, grass, rabbit, hawk, and mushroom. Ask them to draw and label an energy model, then explain each arrow.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give groups organism cards and yarn, then have them build a food web with yarn showing the direction of energy flow.
Ask students to write: What would happen to a meadow food web if all the grass disappeared?
Play Food Chain Fix-Up by giving teams mixed-up organism cards and asking them to arrange and defend each chain.
Trace one school lunch ingredient back through its energy chain, beginning with the Sun and including a decomposer.
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Printable S4L1.b Worksheet
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Related Standards
- S4L1
Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about the roles of organisms and the flow of energy within an ecosystem.
- S7L4.b
Develop a model to describe the cycling of matter and the flow of energy among biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem.
- S4L1.a
Develop a model to describe the roles of producers, consumers, and decomposers in a community.
- S4L1.d
Use printed and digital data to develop a model illustrating and describing changes to the flow of energy in an ecosystem when plants or animals become scarce, ...
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