Living or Non-Living

We started our animal classification work this week with a look at the definitions of living and non-living from Montessori Print Shop

This is a great lesson - it starts with a lesson on the 7 characteristics of all living things - decided to test the girls after the initial lesson and asked them to place a plastic animal under the corect heading

moved onto a sorting activity full of wonderful photos,

then clarified it further by dividing non-living into 2 further subgroup's - once alive and never alive

this provided some great discussions among the girls along the lines of; milk - non-living but was it once alive or just from a living thing? Fossil - non-living but does the imprint of the skeleton constitute once living or is it never alive because its just made up of sediment?

I loved the thought provoking nature of this work. (and I'm super glad it came with a control chart to help answer all those interesting questions)

We followed this with an attempt at naming all the living things in our garden (or in the older girls case, all that they could see from our garden). Armed with their clipboards they headed outside. Tulip drew what she could see

unflower and Lilly made lists (we had to refer to the 7 characteristics of living things a couple of times, especially for water)

by the time they had got to item 48 they were bored and said it was too much work to list everything alive - cue a discussion on why we classify living things into groups as an intro for our work next week.

On a side note - if you want a sneak peak at next weeks work on classification take a look at the MPS animal bundles : )

Disclaimer

This product was provided free to me for the purpose of review. I was not paid for this review and all opinions are my own.