Lesson 7 - Antarctic and Arctic food webs and the global importance of plankton (As cold as ice)

Lesson 7 - a quick introduction to food chains followed by expanding it to food webs. Includes interactive card sorting activities. Then students watch a video about plankton and why they are so important. This provides details about plankton being at the bottom of the food chain and their link to food supplies, oxygen supplies and fossil fuels.

This is a scheme of work about cold environments / polar places. It is designed to work in a completely mixed ability classroom and therefore is differentiated wherever necessary and includes challenge/extension questions. It includes the following topics:
- Where cold environments are and what they are like
- How people use cold environments
- What a glacier is and how it forms
- How glaciers change the landscape by creating corries, aretes and pyramidal peaks
- A comparison of the Arctic and Antarctic and why they are so cold
- Food chains, food webs and the wider importance of plankton at the bottom of the food chain
- Snowball earth and the idea of ice ages with varying amounts of ice on the planet
- The Antarctic treaty
- How cold places are changing, focusing on ice shelf collapse and sea level rise