Dining on a Sunbeam: Food Chains & Food Webs

Dining on sunbeams might sound like a slim diet. But sunlight is the source of everything we eat!

Here is a fascinating account of how food is produced by energy from the sun. In simple language, the author tells young readers how the sun sends its light to the earth and how green plants transform it into the food all living things depend on.

Children will discover that everything they ate for breakfast this morning–even the milk–started with green plants and sunlight. (A cow has to eat fourteen pounds of green grass to produce a quart of milk!)

They'll also learn about food chains–the system of "who eats what" and "who eats who" that links all animals and plants together. The author introduces examples that will be familiar to all youngsters. For instance, one food chain may begin with a grasshopper feeding on clover. A frog eats the grasshopper...a snake eats the frog...a hawk eats the snake. When the hawk dies, scavengers feed on the body. Bacteria and non-green plants turn the remains into fertilizer to help new life grow.

Along the way, young readers will learn an important lesson in ecology. The author explains when one part of a food web is destroyed, all the other parts suffer as well. If a farmer sprays his fields with pesticides, the insects feeding there become poisoned. The next link in the food chain either dies of carries the poison on on to its predator. At some point, the chain is broken–adversely affecting the web of life.

Dining on a Sunbeam makes the basic laws of ecology easy for young children to learn. What better lesson than to know that all living things depend on each other for life!