Texas TEKS 2.12.B
The Standard
create and describe food chains identifying producers and consumers to demonstrate how animals depend on other living things
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Science
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students build a simple feeding sequence, usually beginning with a plant. They label plants as producers and animals as consumers. They explain what each animal gets from the living thing before it.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given unfamiliar organism pictures, students place them in a reasonable feeding order and label each role correctly. They use arrows from the food to the eater. They can predict how losing one organism affects another.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think plants get their food from soil instead of making it with sunlight. They may label plant-eating animals as producers. They also may reverse arrows because they think arrows point toward the organism being eaten.
How to Assess It
- Exit ticket: Draw a chain using grass, rabbit, and hawk. Add arrows, label each organism as producer or consumer, and explain one feeding link.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs cards showing grass, grasshopper, frog, and hawk, plus yarn; students order, connect, and label each organism.
Ask, "What would happen to frogs if grasshoppers disappeared?" Students write two sentences and name the link that changed.
Play Food Chain Fix-It: display one incorrect chain, and teams race to reorder and relabel it, then explain one correction.
Walk the schoolyard, record one plant and nearby animal, then sketch a possible feeding link supported by observation or a field guide.
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Printable 2.12.B Worksheet
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Related Standards
- 1.12.C
identify and illustrate how living organisms depend on each other through food chains.
- 4.12.B
describe the cycling of matter and flow of energy through food webs, including the roles of the Sun, producers, consumers, and decomposers; and
- 2.13.B
record and compare how the structures and behaviors of animals help them find and take in food, water, and air;
- 3.12.B
identify and describe the flow of energy in a food chain and predict how changes in a food chain such as removal of frogs from a pond or bees from a field affec...
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