3rd Grade Food Chains
Third graders at Davis Elementary are learning about food chains (SOL3.5) and ecosystems (SOL3.6) so today students in Ms. Eller’s class created animated aquatic and terrestrial food chains using Google slides. First we discussed food chains and how they were the same and different in various ecosystems. All of them start with the sun which gives energy to plants. The plants are different, as well as the animals that eat the plants and each other. The students chose an ecosystem they wanted to research and present. I created an assignment in Google classroom with a blank Google slideshow template. They wrote the type of food chain for the title and their name for the subtitle. I showed them how to create a new slide and use the research tool to find a picture of the sun. Next we found a picture of a plant that lives in the ecosystem (pond, ocean, desert, etc). I taught them how to add an arrow showing the flow of energy from the sun to the plant. We discussed where the next arrow would point (to an animal that eats the plant). The students added additional animal photos and arrows to connect them into a food chain. Finally I showed them how to add animations to make the food chain grow in sequence. We posted the finished slideshows to the classroom page. You can see them all here.