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Teaching activity - Rocky shore food web

This level 3-4 resource illustrates how an Assessment Resource Banks item about rocky shore food webs can be adapted to build students’ capabilities to engage with science in real-life situations.

A seagull with a crab in its beak.

Tags

  • AudienceKaiako
  • Curriculum Level4
  • Resource LanguageEnglish

This resource adapts an item from Assessment Resource Banks about food chains and food webs to provide an opportunity for students to engage in real-life science by exploring and explaining how living things respond to environmental changes. 

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Teaching activity: Rocky shore food web

Learning focus

Students develop their awareness of the range of consequences an action might have.

Learning activity 

Assessment Resource Banks

This item from Assessment Resource Banks is about interpreting food chains and food webs. The existing resource provides an opportunity for students to strengthen their capability to make sense of representations about science ideas. It can be easily adapted, though, to foreground the idea that any particular action can have a range of consequences.

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First, work through the existing activity as a class checking that students can read and construct a food web. Now ask:

If the crabs all developed a disease and died what would be the consequences for the other species in the food web?

Encourage students to give as many responses as they can, supporting their ideas with reasons. Students should be encouraged to think about both short term and long term consequences. (For example, in the short term there may be lots more chiton (because there are no crabs to eat them). There might be fewer mussels (because seagulls don’t have anything else to eat). With more chiton and fewer mussels there might be more plant plankton and less seaweed. When the seaweed is eventually all eaten the chiton will die off because they will have nothing to eat and the shrimps will only be able to eat plant plankton, etc.)

Encourage students to use tentative language (might, may be, it depends, etc.) when they are suggesting consequences. This reinforces the idea that it is often difficult to predict in advance what the consequences might be.

Lead a discussion about the sorts of questions students would need answered to be surer of their predicted consequences. (What is the life span of a chiton? How quickly do they breed? How mobile are crabs (i.e., how long would it be before new ones came into the area)?)

Supporting students to become scientifically literate, i.e., to participate as critical, informed, and responsible citizens in a society in which science plays a significant role is the purpose of science in NZC.

Scientifically literate citizens need to understand that any action has a range of consequences. This should help alert them to the possibility of unintended environmental consequences when decisions are made.

What are we looking for?

Can students identify a range of possible consequences (both short term and long term) and give reasons for their answers?

Do they use tentative language when making predictions?

Are they willing to explore a range of possibilities?

The Science Learning Hub - Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao has several resources exploring food webs: