In the woods today we played a great game to help us understand the changes that can occur in a food chain. Both P5 classes were there at the same time today.  It was a very wet day but no-one cared- even though we were out all morning 🙂

First we re-capped on the key labels of a food chain and acted out a simple woodland chain. Then most children were labelled as leaves but 8 children wore a high-viz vest and they were caterpillars.The caterpillars walked around ‘eating’ leaves – once a leaf had been eaten they had to join hands with the caterpillars to form a chain.Eventually the caterpillars ate all the leaves and we discussed what would happen to the caterpillars etc.

We repeated the game but introduced 4 birds to eat the caterpillars. Once a caterpillar had been eaten their whole chain had to sit down. Again we discussed what would happen once all the caterpillars had been eaten – who would die out etc.

After that we were joined by Angus Dixon who had bought along 50 oak saplings for us to plant. The children worked in groups of 3 or 4 to plant the trees – there was some great team work and some groups really rose to the challenge.