Animal or Plant?

This resource is a skeleton outline for looking at living things and classifying them as plants vs. animals. The scope is wide, covering everything from basic definitions to illustration of careers in science. One of the activities involves  going on a walk to extend the practice of classification. Covers a wide spectrum of the curriculum. One of the most important parts in this lesson is introducing the students to the idea that scientists are regularly performing tasks of classification, like what they are doing in the activity. This will not only inform students of future potential in science, but will additionally encourage them in completing the activity. It will have meaning outside of a gradescale. The very beginning of this lesson must first address the difference between living and nonliving things. The lesson plan offers a way to illustrate this. Once the first fact is established, the teaching can advance to the idea of the difference between plants and animals. Living things are searched for in the activity part of the lesson, where students will investigate how plants and animals live in different places, for different reasons. The outdoor (or indoor, depending on the classroom environment) activity allows for the opportunity to present how animals and plants relate to each other-- for example, if a squirrel as found in a tree, explain that the tree provides food and shelter for the squirrel. This activity can also be applied in other ways-- for example, to illustrate the first and most basic part of the lesson, students could be asked to qualify objects as living vs. nonliving before breaking those categories down further (plants, animals, etc.).