Fifth Grade

Pre- and Post-Visit Activities

Explore pre- and post-visit activities designed for every grade level. Use the links below to find lessons, videos, and book ideas that help prepare your students for their outdoor experience—and extend learning back in the classroom.

Food Chains and Food Webs

Activities/Videos

27 Fun Food Web and Food Chain Activities (We Are Teachers)

8 Hands-On Activities to Master Food Chains and Food Webs

Food Chain for Kids – INTERACTIVE | Learn all about producers, consumers, and decomposers (YouTube)

Food Chains Compilation: Crash Course Kids (YouTube)

FOOD CHAINS for Kids 🌱⬅🐝⬅🐦⬅🐺 Trophic Levels 🌼 Episode 1 (YouTube)

Books

Who Eats What? Food Chains and Food Webs by Patricia Lauber

This is a clear and appealing science book for early elementary age kids, both at home and in the classroom. It features simple, engaging text by Patricia Lauber, fascinating diagrams, and beautifully detailed illustrations by Holly Keller. Both text and artwork were vetted for accuracy.

This is a Level 2 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out, which means the book explores more challenging concepts for children in the primary grades. 

What Are Food Chains and Webs? by Bobbie Kalman

Fascinating diagrams show children the connection between herbivores, carnivores, scavengers, decomposers, and themselves; and concepts such as energy pyramids, photosynthesis, and consumer hierarchies. It also contains an entertaining food web game.

Pass the Energy, Please! by Barbara Shaw McKinney

Learning becomes fun with this book about the food chain and transfer of energy connecting all life on earth. Amazing artwork will inspire children in classrooms and at home to appreciate the world around us and feel part of it all. Each of nature's creatures "passes the energy" in its own unique way. In this upbeat rhyming story, the food chain connects herbivores, carnivores, insects and plants together in a fascinating circle of players. All beings on Earth from the anchovy to the zooplankton depend upon the green plant, which is the hero of the story.

Food Chains and Webs by Abbie Dunne

Simple text and bright photographs explain the concept of food chains and webs for beginning readers. The book concludes with a simple, kid—friendly activity.

Consumers, Producers, & Decomposers

Books

Producers, Consumers, and Decomposers (Spotlight on Ecology and Life Science) by Dava Pressberg

Producers, Consumers, and Decomposers (2017) by Dava Pressberg is a life science guide that focuses on ecological energy flow and is aimed at young readers. Part of the Spotlight on Ecology and Life Science series, it explains the roles of producers, consumers, and decomposers using color photos, examples of organisms, and food chain dynamics.

World of Rot: Learn All about the Wriggly, Slimy, Super-Cool Decomposers We Couldn’t Live Without by Britt Crow-Miller

With a touch of humor and quirky full-color illustrations, kids will learn about the life-recycling system happening all around us—in the sea, in the soil, and even inside our own bodies. Profiles of decomposers such as hungry fungi and familiar worms, poop-slurping butterflies, and slimy banana slugs offer something to pique every kid's curiosity. Readers will also learn the heroic role decomposers might play in fighting climate change and eating plastic. 

Rotten!: Vultures, Beetles, Slime, and Nature's Other Decomposers by Anita Sanchez

A funny and fact-filled look at decomposition in all of its slimy glory, illustrated with dazzling full-color art by Gilbert Ford. Vultures, fungi, dung beetles, and more aid in this fascinating and sometimes smelly aspect of the life cycle that’s right under our noses.