What's for dinner?

My two boys are always asking me what animals eat, and who eats who. They love all the apex predators like T-Rex and great white sharks and crocodiles and seem to be totally unfazed by videos of Komodo dragons eating buffalo and lions devouring zebras.

And we have recently been learning about and listening to a lot about friendship so I thought it would be good to counter this with looking at the food chain and animal 'enemies'. Ferdy loved the BBC bitesize video and we learnt a little about simple food chains before we set off on the train to the Sea Life Centre to look for some of the different links in a food chain.

We've been fortunate enough to see two different types of penguins in the last couple of weeks: Humbolt penguins (from Chile) and Gentoo penguins (from Antarctica). We were also on the hunt for sharks (both boys), seahorses (Gil), plesiosaurs (Ferdy), clown fish (Gil), eels (Ferdy), seals (me), rays (Ferdy) and we found them all. The only thing we couldn't find was krill or shrimp which was at the bottom of our food chain worksheet. Oh and there was a dearth of plesiosaurs.

Most exciting was seeing the two seals: Boo and Pippa being fed fish (2nd on our food chain eaten by 3rd on our food chain) and Ferdy and Gil even managed to watch from within a glass box right in the heart of the seal tank.

Boo catches a fish

We seem to be unable to visit Birmingham without a stop off at the magnificent Central library so after completing our worksheets over lunch, and a few rides on the escalators we managed to spend a happy hour reading. Good books included: Bob's Best Friend Ever; Little Red; Harry & Hopper and The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon. It struck me that many children's books are primarily about friendship or predation.

Later on Ferdy wrote about food chains and then drew his own: algae, eaten by mosquito larvae, eaten by a mosquito larvae eating fish, eaten by a heron, eaten by an alligator.