Begin with a producer
Plants use sunlight to make food and can start a food chain.
Food Chain Builder
Connect meadow organisms in feeding order and trace energy from food to eater.
Grades 3–5 · Biology
Your goal
Build a 3-organism meadow chain from Grass to Fox.
Reduced motion is on. The controls still update the scene.
Choose a meadow plant to begin.
A producer makes its own food. Each consumer gets energy by eating an earlier organism. Arrows point from the food to the eater. This meadow model shows possible feeding relationships, not everything each animal eats.
Real ecosystems have branching food webs, decomposers, and changing populations. Energy is transferred and used at each step. Organisms are not to scale.
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Learn with Food Chain Builder
Food Chain Builder helps students construct a meadow food chain by choosing a producer and compatible consumers. Follow the arrows from food to eater and explain how energy moves between organisms. The Sun is shown as an energy source for plants rather than an organism in the chain. Elementary learners can test feeding relationships, compare their choices, and discover why a food chain must connect organisms that can actually feed on one another in the modeled habitat.
What to look for
Follow the arrows
An arrow points from the food to the organism that eats it.
Check each link
A food chain needs real feeding relationships between neighboring organisms.
For teachers and curious learners
Build a coherent food chain beginning with a producer. Ask students to predict what will happen, change one setting, and explain what they observe. Learn gives a starting point. Practice and Challenge offer new goals with the same scene.
This is a simplified meadow with selected feeding relationships. Real organisms can have several foods and predators, making interconnected food webs.
Continue with Food Chain & Food Web Builder .