Digestive system
The digestive system is the long tube and organs that break food down into tiny pieces your body can absorb for energy and growth, then get rid of what is left as waste.
Science · Ages 8–10 · 55 minutes
Building and reading food chains
Children build food chains that start with a plant, use arrows to show the direction the energy goes, and identify producers, prey and predators.
Success criteria
- I can start a food chain with a plant
- I can draw arrows that mean "is eaten by"
- I can label a producer, a predator and prey
Key vocabulary
- food chain
- producer
- consumer
- predator
- prey
- herbivore
- carnivore
- omnivore
- energy
You will need
- strips of coloured paper
- glue sticks or staplers
- animal and plant picture cards
- mini whiteboards
Curriculum links
- Year 4· England
Practice sheets
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Wild animals word search
Ocean word search
Missing letters: Ocean
Food chains look simple until you ask which way the arrows go. This lesson builds a paper chain that children can hold, fixes the arrow rule early ("is eaten by") and then sends them off to build chains of their own, on land and in the sea.
1.Starter
6 minutesWrite three words on the board: grass, fox, rabbit. Ask: "Put these in an order that makes sense and explain your order to your partner." Most pairs will find grass → rabbit → fox. Then ask: "Where did the grass get its energy from?" Steer towards the Sun. Six minutes.
2.Teach
10–15 minDraw the chain: Sun → grass → rabbit → fox. Say: "In a food chain, the arrow means is eaten by, or gives its energy to. Read it with me: grass is eaten by the rabbit, the rabbit is eaten by the fox."
Introduce the labels one at a time and write them under the chain:
- "The grass is a producer. It makes its own food using sunlight. Almost every food chain starts with a plant."
- "The rabbit is a consumer. It eats the plant. It is also prey, because it is hunted."
- "The fox is a predator. It hunts other animals."
Then model a sea chain with the class doing the thinking: seaweed → sea snail → crab → octopus. Ask: "Which one is the producer? Is the crab a predator or prey?" Let them discover it can be both.
leaf
rabbit
fox
crab
octopus
