Big Dreams: In memory of Dr. King...

We talk a lot in literacy about working to expand our vocabulary by tuning in to interesting words, so before today's holiday we read Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier, noting the words he used and the power and resonance of simple words like "Peace," "Freedom," and "Love."

Our writing prompt, naturally, was about what our own big dreams are. Our class is in the middle of a Harry Potter craze right now, so not surprisingly, many of the dreams centered around a Harry Potter theme:

Several students tackled more serious issues as well:

And there's always a few Seabury students who are out to change the world in new and interesting ways:

Play video games 12 hours a day by asking our moms to play on their phones and everyone getting a phone?  WE CAN DO THIS!

Don't we all have that dream  - wishing we could fly?

This one is hard to read despite my efforts to increase contrast: I wish everything was free so then you could get everything you need and instead of wasting time standing in the checkout aisle, you could just walk out of the shop. My dream would save a lot of time and energy, just in case they need to play a sport.

Keep on dreaming, Gemstones! 

Thinking Like A Scientist: Using a Dichotomous Key

Dichotomous Key: a series of pairs of phrases or descriptions which are used to classify a group of living things by making choices between the sets of traits and characters described in each pair. 

Last week, we tried out using a dichotomous key by building our own little aliens and using the key to determine their names:

Their names were "C," "L," "A" "S," "S," "I," "F," and "Y."

What did we learn? Being a scientist is delicious - as are vegan marshmallows! And using a dichotomous key? Not that hard!

Animal Taxonomy - Scientific Practice

We got right back to work after winter break, taking what we learned about animal classification and why it's important and now learning how the scientists have actually done it. We each came up with our own mnemonic (memory device) to help remember the levels of classification, and then we each chose an animal and researched each level of its taxonomy:

KPCOFGS: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species:

  No, not smushed frogs!

 

Feeling cranky, anyone? How about some green soup?

and the musical version - don't you wish you had a karaoke phone?

At any rate, these creative kids now know their classification system!

Animal Taxonomy - Using Inductive Reasoning

At Seabury, we focus on hands-on, experiential learning, and this unit is a prime example. We began the study of animal taxonomy and classification, not by diving right in to learn about Carolus Linnaeus and memorizing the different levels of classification (this comes later - stay tuned for a later post on this), but by thinking like scientists and trying to get at the big picture - why is it important for scientists to classify living things? How can that help us understand animals better? Why do we even care, or, through the lens of our overarching concept this year: What is it that we "treasure" about animals?

So, instead, we started learning about animals by looking at our shoes. Yes, our shoes. It all began with "The Great Shoe Sort" -- each of us put one shoe onto the paper-covered classroom floor, and then we went about sorting and classifying our shoes by paying attention to different characteristics. We noticed different groupings such as how they were fastened: shoes with laces and without laces, shoes fastened with velcro and slip-on shoes with no fasteners; and also what different shoes were designed for: athletic shoes vs. dressy shoes, etc.

We started dividing the shoes into groups by characteristics like these, and kept sorting until we had 19 different "species" of shoes, each with a unique set of characteristics.

Then we moved on to sorting and classifying stuffed animals. The students were asked to think like scientists and to sort the animals into categories that might be useful to scientists.

They came up with major categories like land animals vs. sea animals ...

 Mammals vs. fish ...

Creatures with claws and creatures without claws...

Then we did this activity one more time using animal identification cards. We chose cards on animals we were interested in, read the back of the card to learn about the different animal attributes, and then sorted the cards into groups, again trying to think about it from a scientist's perspective. This time, the  groupings were focused onto even more specific attributes, including one group that looked at the skull shape as well as the type of teeth:

Finally, we wrote justifications for why we chose to classify the animals the way we did:

Using their critical thinking and inductive reasoning skills, and without yet being presented any information on how scientists do actually classify animals, the Gemstones came remarkable close to identifying the major classes of vertebrates (you can see above that students grouped animals into categories such as mammals, reptiles, fish and birds) and made some good insights into how these grouping help us understand animals better. Students noted in their writings, above, that knowing what they eat (herbivores/carnivores/omnivores) and where they live can help us understand where they originated, where they live now, and what their needs are. Not bad, for 7 and 8 year olds - budding young scientific minds at work!