Scientific Classification Unit

 
We did a two day review of scientific classification.  Since science is so big in our house (my husband is a scientist) this comes up a lot but not in any organized fashion.  We did a little mini unit on it last year but it definitely needed repeating.  The prompt was the great free tiger lapbook we did from Homeschool Share for India week.  One of the activities was writing out the full classification for a tiger.

I downloaded the scientific classification materials from Montessori Print Shop.  We used the Six Kingdoms of Life Charts, Six Kingdoms of Life Classification Concepts, and the Six Kingdoms of Life Information Cards.

We also played the Strange Sightings game from Great Map Games.  Since geography is our larger theme this year, this was the game in the book about animals.  As we talked about where the animals were from, we talked about how they were classified too.  

Wildlife Fun for Kids did a GREAT post called Hop, Stick, and Jump into Animal Classification.  I adapted two of her activities to learning the kingdoms and general classification.  

I took some of the Kingdoms of Life cards and taped them to the trampoline.  This is not as pretty as hers, but I didn't trust myself to actually draw Protists or Eubacteria correctly.  

The boys bounced in the center and had to jump to whatever kingdom I said.  Then I made it harder for older Toad by asking him a fact about the life forms in each kingdom.  He had to jump to the right answer.

After we did that for awhile, we played classification hopscotch.

I put genus, species at the end as the double since those are the most common ones you see, which I explained.  We used little rocks to move up and down the court.

Younger Toad was so cute.  He'd jump along and not necessarily remember every word but when he got to the end he'd hop with both feet and yell "GENIUS, SPECIES" (that's spelled how he said it).

  These two activities were a big hit and very effective.  Eating dinner that night, younger Toad was telling Daddy about his day and was able to list the classification categories in order, and help his brother out when he was forgetting to list the Protists.  They're clearly great memory building devices that we can use to cover other subjects.

We read these two books on the subject:

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