About this worksheet
A meadow food web on page 1 drives this 5th grade science sheet. Grass and clover feed rabbits, mice and grasshoppers, which feed snakes, foxes and hawks, and mushrooms and bacteria return nutrients to the soil. Students predict four changes, each with a because line: a disease that wipes out the clover, foxes leaving for a new neighborhood, a late spring freeze that kills the grasshoppers, and a chemical spill that destroys the decomposers. A challenge question asks which organism the meadow could least afford to lose. It ties to NGSS 5-LS2-1, and two answer pages give model predictions.
