Chain, Chain, chain...Chain of Food!

 How can energy continuously cycle through an ecosystem? 

That's what we wanted to know! So we set out to uncover the answer! For this unit students needed to be able to describe how energy derived from the sun is used by plants to produce sugars (photosynthesis) and is transferred within a food chain from producers, to consumers, to decomposers. We also needed to be able to develop a model to describe the movement of energy through a food chain. 

We started off by doing our background research on food chains - what they are, how they can be different, and how different organisms live in different food chains. We studied the difference between producers (they can make their own food) and consumers (depend on eating other organisms for food) and how they depend on each other for survival. Once we had the background knowledge, we set out to build our model. How? STOP MOTION VIDEOS!! 

First, we had to build our ecosystem backgrounds. 

Then, we built our organisms out of clay and other craft supplies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally...ACTION! 

We were really happy with the final results!
Check out all of our stop motions videos here

ENJOY!