Students learning about Living and Nonliving Things

My students were very eager to see what was in the paperbags. First graders are easily excited. I gave them the bag and they were suprised to find about 12 different types of candy inside. We spent the next fifteen minutes sorting it by what they have in common. I then gave the students the word classification. We moved on to talking about the question on the board; "How do we know if something is living?" They were quick to come up with what they thought were characteristics. One misconception was it moves. Even though some living things do move so does rain and clouds and they are nonliving.

With more questions we finally came up with these four questions to ask to see if something is living or nonliving: Does it need water? Does it need food? Does it need air? Does it need shelter?

We then looked around the room and found items that are living and nonliving. Some of my students were able to list and others asked to draw their things. I accepted both from my students. When viewing their learning samples you will see how the students were able to show their understanding of living and nonliving things.

I then showed them some examples of living and nonliving things and we went through our characteristics and was easily able to answer our questions of whether it was living or nonliving. You can tell by my students work samples that it was them answering the question and if they had all yeses then it was living.

My students enjoyed the inquiry learning because they were coming up with their own characteristic and then we would put it to the test and they were amazed how easily it was able to tell if something was living or nonliving. It is important for students to classify at an early age because science has a lot of classifying.