Middle School Inquiry Lab on Food Chains, Webs, and Pyramids
In this lab students will demonstrate the flow of energy throughout living systems such as food chains, food webs, and energy pyramids.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How does energy flow through a living system?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
Materials List:
- “Organisms in the Forest Biome” page
- 1 yard yarn or string
- scissors
- tape or glue
- colored pencils
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students will diagram all three ways to show the flow of energy in an ecosystem. The first method is by using an energy pyramid. Students will color in the levels of the energy pyramid starting with the producer level all the way to the tertiary level. Then, examining the forest biome cards, students will then color the organism cards the same colors that would indicate the trophic level they represent on the energy pyramid.
With the combination of food chain and food web, students will cut out all the organism cards and space them out on the food web page provided. Using the yarn, students will start to connect the organisms showing the “what-eats-what” relationships among them. Starting with the sun, students will create a tangled web showing the intricate flow of energy cycling through the forest biome.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here are a few that come with the lab:
- Is it possible for energy to be transferred directly from the first trophic level to the third trophic level? Explain.
- Is it possible for energy to be transferred from the second trophic level to the fourth level? If so, give an example from our activity.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Why do you think the amount of energy that is passed from one trophic level to the next is reduced with each level?
- Where would decomposers fit in the energy pyramid? Why?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 7.5B – Students will diagram the flow of energy through living systems, including food chains, food webs, and energy pyramids.
NGSS: MS-LS1-6 – Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for the role of photosynthesis in the cycling of matter and flow of energy into and out of organisms.
