 |
 |
 |
||||||
|
The following two-part game will help to reinforce what has been learnt from pond- or stream-dipping about the habits of different freshwater creatures and the way they interact with each other within a food web. The leader should have read the section “What Have You Caught?” on this Pond-Dipping web page, including the note about food webs, and will find further useful information in “The Freshwater Name Trail” produced by the Field Studies Council.
Resources needed are
For part 1:
Name/Picture cards of a selection of freshwater animals*
Safety pins or clips
For part 2:
Name/Picture cards for the sun and for plants & algae*
Lengths of wool or string
* Download name/picture cards as a PDF file.
In the first part of the game, players work in pairs. The leader pins a name or picture card to each player’s back, so that the player does not know what animal he or she is but their partner does. At the leader’s signal, players take turns to ask questions of their partner to get clues about what animal they are. Before starting the game, the leader may find it helpful to discuss with the players the sorts of question that will help them to find out what they are – e.g. “Do I live in the weeds? Do I eat other animals?” The players can ask as many questions as they want, but the answers must be limited to “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”. At the end of the allotted time, the players one by one tell everyone what animal they think they are.
For the second part of the game: each player pins their name or picture card to their front for all to see; the leader wears a card as ‘the sun’; assistant leaders wear cards as ‘plants/algae’; and everyone stands in a circle. Leaders and players work together using lengths of wool or string to link predators to their prey, herbivores to plants, and plants to the sun. At the end, everyone in the circle will be linked to others in a visible food web. If coloured wool or string is available, use different colours for the different types of interaction (plant growth, herbivory, predation, etc). Older groups – after building a complete web – can explore what happens to the web when a vital link is removed and the links that depend on it are then successively removed. For younger groups, the leader can use this approach to demonstrate the effect of removing the sun and thus, successively, every other link in the food web, since all freshwater animals depend ultimately on the sun’s energy.
