Fun with Food Chains
A Home Schooling Holiday
With the Easter break upon us school is out this and next week and we can take it a bit slow on the home-schooling front. We do not want to lose the momentum completely though now that we finally seemed to settle into a good routine and system with home learning.
We dedicated the weekend entirely to building a Lego city in the bedroom without much else going on other than eating and sleeping and it was a great way to recharge and relax after the very steep learning curve home schooling has made us climb.
As we are still in lock-down here in Malaysia I thought the homebound holiday would be the ideal opportunity to take on a topic that we have been wanting to submerge ourselves in for quite some time namely Food Chains.
BrainPop
I did a bit of research online and came across this great website called BrainPop, which currently offers FREE access to learning resources for schools and families impacted by school closures. I signed up for the FREE family access and I am very pleased and impressed with the BrainPop Jr interactive resources covering every imaginable topic for home learners and with options to choose age/class level. You can follow this link to check it out for yourself: https://www.brainpop.com/
Food Chain Activities
As my immediate goal was to get the kids learning more about food chains I went to the science section and searched ‘food chains’, which amongst many other things includes short animated videos. We watched one on food chains together and then completed the corresponding quiz over lunch. After that, the kids had a go at making their own interactive maps i.e. food chains and food webs on the BrainPop Jr website using images, keywords, text bubbles and more. They really loved this and we will definitely be returning to this activity.
There are many more resources and activities, which we have yet to explore and I am sure it will make for some fun learning this coming week i.e. games, downloadable colouring and work sheets; jokes; word play; ideas for lessons and so much other great stuff.
Learning through Play
Today we decided to get hands-on making food chains and webs with the kids collection of toy animals. The box was emptied on the floor and the boys divided them all into different groups of animals i.e. insects, birds, mammals, meat eaters, pond dwellers, herbivores etc. and wrote labels for each group.
We then asked them to select representatives for each animal group, as much as possible and set up a more complex food web starting with the sun in the middle followed by producers, then primary consumers, secondary consumers, all the way to decomposers working our way through various habitats. It made for a good discussion on what we had learned about the interaction between different food chains and how they impact and depend on each other.
The kids had fun using the toy animals to create the food chains and I think it gave them a good picture of how all animals play an important role within their habitats including humans. I feel we had a good discussion on how the thriving or decline of one species in a given food chain greatly affects a myriad of species in the bigger food web.
I look forward to more fun food chain activities and learning with my kids this week as we stay at home and do what we can to keep learning about and enjoying the world around us from our home base.
