At my school we do inquiry units. In case you don’t know what an inquiry unit is it is a unit that covers either social studies or science ideas and is incorporated in our reading and math units as well. Our students are doing animals. This means students check out books from the library about animals or a specific animal. They study and learn about habitat, it’s environment/where animals lives, adaptations, physical features, if it is endangered and so on.
So studying our animals and learning everything about animals means that you still teach lessons but students will independently research on their own as well. So I created a lesson on classification and learning about what makes an animal an omnivore, carnivore and herbivore.
I started off by having students in their pods talk about classification and if they could classify one another or classify themselves into groups.
I got GREAT responses. Students classified themselves as boy and girls, brown hair and black hair, tall and short, letters of their name, birthdays. It was so awesome seeing how creative they could be.
Then I gave each pod 13 Beanie Babies. (The night before I sorted through all my beanie babies, I had lot of siblings so I had doubles even triples. I made sure each group had a lion, a dog, a cat and then I equally divided them out. You don’t have to do that but it was easier for myself and making sure they had discussion about animals I knew that would challenge them.) When I gave the students the 13 Beanie Babies I asked them to classify the Beanie Babies.
The students were once again VERY creative with their classification. They classified them by appearance, where they live, if they are small or large, then they went according to fur or hair. Again I was super impressed.
I then showed the students a short you-tube clip on classifying animals according to carnivore, omnivore and herbivore. After watching the video and taking notes using a graphic organizer I then asked students to go back to their desk and decide which Beanie
The great debate for all my students were the cat and dog. Everyone saw on the video how they said cats and dogs are omnivores but, our pets are home only eat pet food/little pellets. This was such a great discussion at the tables when I walked around, and each group appeared to be split down the middle. So I had a discussion as a whole group at the end about this. Explaining how they are omnivores and each both meat and plants. Any dog food or cat food includes these ingredients.
Our Learning Targets clearly stated and written on the board for all students to see and understand :)
This was such a fun lesson and very successful and memorable for my students. I had to share with everyone what a great lesson it was! :)
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