Food Chains and Food Webs – Free Reading Passage

Follow the energy from the sun through one pond in this free food chains and food webs reading passage for grades 3–5. A morning at the pond shows algae acting as producers, a snail grazing, a sunfish gulping the snail and a heron catching the fish. The second passage page explains how to read feeding arrows ("gives energy to") and shows how many chains join into a food web, with an illustrated pond web of eight living things.

Four student pages put the reading to work. Students mark true or false and fix the false statements, explain with evidence, and predict what happens to sunfish and turtles if the snails disappear. They read the food web to answer five questions, put desert and garden chains in order, draw arrows that point to the eater and fill in a word bank. A schoolyard page has them draw and label their own food chain, then grow it into a web. A page of nine cut-out cards turns the pond web into a yarn activity for the whole class.

• Grades 3–5: life science and informational reading
• Nine pages: two passage pages, four question and activity pages, one card page and a two-part answer key
• Free download: a color PDF and a black-and-white PDF