Teach your kids how animals are classified

Sometimes a great homeschool science lesson just requires a few pictures and a willingness to sit back and let the kids go at it. This animal classification lesson is one of those types of lessons.  The kids took it and ran.

 

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This is actually a furtherance of our food web science lesson from earlier, or at least we taught it as part of the same unit in CKE Biology*.

Animal classification lesson supplies

animal classification cards, index cards* (because I’ve been using index cards for everything lately, so I bought 1000 of them), markers*

 

Animal classification lesson

First I randomly passed out the cards while chanting “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”  Then I gave them a few minutes to negotiate who got which card, because, while they didn’t throw a fit there was definite looks of jealousy as their siblings got their favorite animals.

Then I asked them what are some different ways you can classify animals?

Well, they went straight to where I was hoping to lead up to eventually: what they eat (herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore).  So I pulled out my handy dandy index cards and wrote the three categories on them.

Then they took turns putting their animals into the different piles.  Sometimes we had discussions on whether an animal belonged in omnivore or carnivore/herbivore.

After all of the animals were categorized I asked if there were other ways to categorize animals, and after thinking for a little bit, and talking about Wild Kratts, which I swear they watch obsessively, they came up with: producer, consumer, and decomposer).  So, they carefully sorted the animals into the piles.  Very quickly they realized no animals are actually producers.  Most are consumers, and a few are decomposers.

Then because the lesson we were going to read was actually on this topic I asked if there was any other ways to categorize animals.  We’d covered this before, but it’d been several years, and after some poking and prodding and a reminder of the classification tree (Kingdom, Phylum, etc) they remembered animals are categorized by similarities and types.

So, I brought out my super duper cool phylum cards for the kids.  I’d spent a couple of hours drawing the various animals out, and was super duper proud of them.  The kids were like “Oh, that’s nice Mom,” and then promptly lost them when this lesson was done, which they later regretted when they had an open book test and didn’t have that information.

They took their animal cards and sorted them out by phylum, carefully matching the animal types to their cards.  Not too surprisingly animal cards tended to veer towards mammals, reptiles, and other land animals, not so many worms or insects.

Curious about some more animal classification lessons?

• Animal Kingdom Notebooks
• Nocturnal and Diurnal Animal sort
• Animal classification lapbook

All of these can be found on my Biology pinterest board.