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Living things to observe
and jump start thinking. |
As an introductory activity to my ecology unit, I wanted students to start thinking about what makes a living thing living. To aid with the brainstorming I provided them with a live plant, a preserved animal (but told them to imagine it as living), and a packet of seeds. What characteristics, processes or needs did these three items possess that leads one to know that they are living? As you can see from the list on the white board they came up with quite a few ideas. Each year I get a different list of things. When the students are having a good day I get really complex answers like: reproduction, die, make waste (feces or urine), are made up of cells, require or consume energy, grow, require nutrients, need water, use oxygen, and the list goes on.
Once that list is generated we work on looking for commonalities between the three items in order to generate a list that all living things have. That list is generally smaller since not all living things have blood or eyes. My next step is to introduce the concept of biotic and abiotic factors. This allows us to build up the necessary vocabulary for studying the components of an ecosystem.
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Lists of the characteristics, processes,
and needs of living things. |
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