Virginia SOL LS.6.a
The Standard
relationships exist between predators and prey and these relationships are modeled in food webs
Virginia Standards of Learning for Science · The student will investigate and understand that populations in a biological community interact and are interdependent. Key ideas include
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students identify predator and prey pairs in a food web and use arrows to show energy moving from food to consumer. They explain how a change in one population affects other populations.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given an unfamiliar food web, students can name each organism's predators and prey. They can predict population changes after one species increases, decreases, or disappears and support the prediction with feeding relationships.
Common Misconceptions
- Students often reverse arrows because they think arrows point toward what gets eaten. They may assume an organism is always either predator or prey, or that one population change affects only one other species.
How to Assess It
- Give students a four-organism food web and ask, “If the snake population decreases, what happens to two other populations?” Require two predictions supported by arrows in the web.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give groups organism cards and yarn, then have them build a food web and label each yarn connection with predator and prey.
Ask students to explain in writing how removing one predator could cause changes across three populations in a food web.
Play a population change card game where teams draw increase, decrease, or removal cards and revise predictions for each connected species.
Use Virginia pond organisms such as frogs, insects, fish, and herons to model how habitat changes affect local predator and prey populations.
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