Food chains, nature trail games

download a pdf of the drawings

The illustrations need be seperated so there is enough space for children to run between them & preferable with arrows pointing the direction.

They could be around 1 meter tall or wide with 4 meter gaps between each one. The chain does not have to be in a straight line.

1) A simple food chain

e.g. carrot, common snail, common toad, hedgehog, red fox, 

Each picture to be about 1 metre across, I’m guessing this is big enough for about 4 children to stand in, and each to be separated by about 4 metres at least, so they aren’t all standing too close together.

Would probably be good to include the arrows in the playground marking as well. (They indicate the flow of energy, or simply mean ‘gets eaten by’.)

Ideas for games:

a) (complex)

• Aim: to get enough food and not get eaten yourself.
• Put a pile of beanbags on the dandelion ‘base’.
• Split the children between the other organisms, with more children lower down the food chain, e.g. 16 snails, 8 toads, 4 hedgehogs, 2 foxes. 
• Let them run around for a set amount of time e.g. one or two minutes, trying to get their ‘food’ and not get caught themselves.  The snails are trying to get a dandelion beanbag, the toads are trying to catch a snail etc..
• The bases are safe, so they can return there with their food.
• After the set time, anyone who hasn’t caught any food dies, and anyone who has been caught dies.  Dead organisms sit out.
• Then start again with the organisms still living. 
• The winner is the one who is left living last. 

b) (easy)

All the children run around until the teacher shouts out one of the names, e.g. "toad!",(or, to get them thinking, "what eats the common snail?!") they all have to reach that organism, the last pupils there are out.  Continue until there’s only one person left.

Here's another idea along similar lines,

This is a game that I developed at Science Line for an interactive talk. I have modified it slightly to use more children.

Delicate web

(KS3 Living things in their environment 5.e)

This game shows how organisms fit together in an ecosystem and where they get their food (energy) from within that system. It’s an easy way of getting children to understand that everything in an ecosystem is connected.

Painting

Create a food web on the playground. You can choose plants and animals from a local ecosystem, or something more exotic involving lions and giraffes.

For the sake of example I shall use wild flower, hare, butterfly, bird, owl.

Grasshopper eats flower

Hare eats flower

Hare eats grasshopper

Bird eat grasshopper

Owl eats bird and hare

How to play

Take 30 children

Place 10 on the flower and 5 on each of the animals.

They are now part of a food web. There are more plants at the base of the web because ultimately all the animals depend on the plants for food. The children should be able to see this by the way the animals connect – they can even use pieces of string to connect organisms that depend on another for food.

Have a list of scenarios like:

Pesticides sprayed by nearby farmers that kills butterflies.

Hare poached.

Woodland cleared lack of nesting sites for birds.

Someone comes and picks the flowers.

They don’t all have to be negative:

Ban on poaching hares.

Wildflower under protection.

Each time a scenario affects one of the organisms a member of its population is removed, if it’s negative. Or a member is added if it’s positive. All the other connecting groups have to modify their population numbers accordingly by adding or removing members of their population. If there are no children left standing on an organism it has become extinct.

If you wanted to play this with less than a whole class full of children you then adopt these rules. All participants start on one knee then go down to 2 knees, sitting, lying down and finally out of the game with extinction. If the population increases they get to stand up, which is rare. It involves someone being there to read out different scenarios the class has invented.

And here's another with the same theme:

Nature trail

download a pdf of the drawings

Paint a trail of circles of at least the size of a dustbin lid.  Each one to depict a group eg birds, reptiles, plants, mammals, humans etc.  Younger children can follow the trail like follow my leader.  It can also be used for grouping work, use of keys, food chains etc.  With playground chalk children could link groups together in a food chain and discuss what would happen if one group were taken out of this chain. 

Game: One child to think of living thing in his or her head. Other children to ask a question e.g. does it have legs?  Child to reply and all children to choose a grouping to stand in.  Other children to ask another question e.g. does it have fur?  Child to reply and all children to revise the grouping they are standing in.  Hopefully the game will end when all the children are standing in the same group and have successfully guessed the living thing.

Useful websites

As recommended by Linda Galvin of Kings Copse Primary School 

Peaceful Playgrounds

Painting maps in playgrounds

Thermoplastic Playground markings

Random thoughts!

Sunshine and Showers – the water cycle

Paint a large snakes and ladders-type grid.  Use paintings of condensation (rain falling from a cloud on to land or sea) or evaporation (water drops moving up towards the sun from rivers/lakes/sea/puddles) together with arrows to suggest moving up or down the board.  Big downward drops by painting a thundercloud  and lightening, small drops by painting a small cloud plus light shower over land.  Large upward movements by showing bright sun over the sea, small movements by showing slight sun over a puddle.  The whole grid could be very colourful and could even incorporate a rainbow.  Children can be taught the water cycle and understand how rainbows form.

Curriculum – KS2 QCA Unit 5D

Compass

Obvious one this, but always worth a mention! Painting a compass, accurately positioned with North pointing well, towards North! It will give the kids a sense of direction….

Axes

Again another fairly obvious one but worth a mention! Paint a large set of axes on a grid.  They should be at least 2 meters long.  Marks on each axis should be at least 25cm apart.  And the grid in squares marked out in thinner lines. Children could use them to construct charts using playground chalk to fill in the squares or mark off points.  Younger children could use them to mark off number column e.g. multiples of two etc.  Older children could use them for making charts to support their scientific investigations outdoors.

Don't mark numbers or anything on the axes, let the children decide their own scales.

Ruler

Here's another one that's maths orientated, mark out a real ruler along a straight edge of the playground, with the measurements on it. You can measure all sorts of things against it – then perhaps use it in conjunction with the axes!

Here's an idea sent in by Cherri Moseley, Bignold First School & Nursery:

We don't have any great markings to speak of at present as they are all faded and tend to be mathematical anyway.

However I do have a great playground maths/science activity using water and syringes.

After a bit of work on capacity, I give my Year 3 children 20ml syringes to fill to the 20ml mark as accurately as they can and ask them how far they can make the water go in the playground.  They complain that it's not very much etc etc. We take out a bucket for refills! Naturally, they play around at first but one makes a long line and pretty soon everyone follows and the competition to make the longest line begins. When we try to measure, we encounter problems, there are breaks in the line and the ends are disappearing. The children are adamant there were no breaks and the ends were longer. What's going on? Time for a science lesson on evaporation! The action quickly moves to making the thinnest line which disappears the fastest. We can gather round and literally watch it happen. Shading it with your hand slows it down etc etc. On a sunny day, this is fun, fantastic and a great learning experience. It also leaves no mess or marking!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks Cherri, though you can of course measure the lines against your painted ruler!

Move it!

Place big and small circles (or any random shapes – lily pads for example!) on the ground at a distance about as far as your age group can jump, and some nearer. To make the game multi functional don't permanently mark any facts on the ground – this you can do with chalk or non permanent paint when you feel like using the game.

Pick your topic and mark out the blobs with appropriate facts! EG if you choose temperature mark different temperatures on each blob and give children the task of getting through the blobs without burning themselves on the really hot ones, or freezing themselves on the really cold ones!  Or perhaps if you choose 'floating and sinking' mark on Wood, or polystyrene, or metal and let the children negotiate the path without sinking.

You'll be able to think of loads of sets of science things or facts that would make an interesting jump game!

The Final Frontier

How about a plan of our solar system? The distances are so great and the planets so small that getting it to scale would take a much bigger playground than you have (Or planets so small you wouldn't see them!) but you can have a representation of the planets in the right order dotted about the playground.  Most space missions which go to different planets have to swing by a couple of different planets to pick up speed so maybe some kind of bat and ball game, or beanbag throwing involving landing on (or in the gravitational field of) the planets in the right order to get them to their destination.

World Map

Painting out a world map on the playground will be a boon for teaching geography and history, but there are also ways that the world map could be used to give it a Science slant. Here are a few science / earth science ideas

Migration of birds, prevailing winds, cartography, time zones, temperature, earths resources and where they are, great engineering feats, tectonic plates and volcanoes, where famous scientists come from, where topical science events are happening (space mission controls, outbreaks of bird flu etc), stars visible from northern and southern hemisphere.

Global Supermarket. Children pick a popular item from the supermarket (eg chocolate!) look at its wrapper, identify where the products came from (ie coco) and then stand on the World map...etc etc ...you get the idea.

The key is to keep the map simple and only write information on it in chalk – thus making it multi functional!

The Peace Corps (from the USA) had a pack for planning/drawing out and painting a wall map of the World with instructions for scaling up etc, this is the only link to be found to it currently,

http://www.mindbird.com/books_about_maps.htm

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