Classification Game

First the kids took all the pictures and made only two piles- one of flying animals (which at first included the bat) and one of everything else. Today I told them to sort them even more. We talked about different features and which ones could get split up again. Some animals are born in water and live near water when they are adults. Do you see any? Then they'd pick out the ones they thought and move them aside. Finally, we ended up with the categories above which we named.

Here they are attempting to sort the bird category. I asked the question whether or not the birds could be broken into smaller groups. R7 thought some of the birds were water birds.

Ok! So they decided this would work. We're going to take a closer look at that loon, which I considered to be a great find in a Ranger Rick magazine, because the characters pass by a loon on the way down the river.

What about the mammals? The kids right away wanted to put that kangaroo out of the group. It took some convincing to keep him in there with the other animals which both I-5 and R7 decided were night time animals. Now I didn't plan this, but it turned out well. so, then I showed them we could sort them into groups within the mammal group.

For me, the next step will be to further develop our definitions of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians by using the pictures. I also plan to laminate the magazine pictures so we can have them around. All of the pictures came from National Wildlife magazines and I pulled all kinds (as I was only culling the magazines one time) but set aside any that weren't fresh water habitat animals (since our current story is a river).

The first day, they put insects in one category and all other animals (that's what's above here) in another. Tomorrow we'll work on insects and I'll use the time to properly introduce various insect orders.