Food Chains and Food Webs Year 7-8

Connect  

Use the activities in the Teaching Guide (below) to spark students’ curiosity before their Healesville Sanctuary visit.

Connect and Understand 

Students will explore Healesville Sanctuary, and by analysing skulls, students will learn to group species based on their structural adaptations for obtaining and digesting food. They will deepen their understanding of interactions between organisms through the construction of a food web and consider the impacts of human activity on these systems.

Students will be encouraged to use this learning to help them to contribute positively to real life conservation issues in their local community.  

Understand  

Use activities in the Teaching Guide to deepen students’ learning back at school.  

Act  

Use the Teaching Guide to enable students to master their knowledge and skills in real-world contexts.

There are differences within and between groups of organisms; classification helps organise this diversity (VCSSU091) 

• Through observations of animals, students learn different ways of classifying organisms based on similarities and differences in features and conservation status 

Interactions between organisms can be described in terms of food chains and food webs and can be affected by human activity (VCSSU093) 

• During close encounters with Australian animals, students will discuss food chains and food webs to understand the relationships between organisms and human impacts on ecosystems 

Identify, analyse and explain interconnections within places and between places and identify and explain changes resulting from these interconnections (VCGGC101)   

• Students will learn about the impact of humans on places, habitats and ecosystems and what effect these impacts may have