What Living Things Need to Survive

A few weeks ago, I wrote about part one of checking prior knowledge and establishing some background information as we embarked on your temr three study of living things.  While in the first lesson, we classified things we saw on our nature walk as living and non-living, in this lesson, we talked about what living things need to survive. I divided the class into small groups of two or three.  Each group was given a piece of paper with the name of a plant or animal on the top.  I chose familiar plants an animals like hamster, cat, dog, tree, squirrel. They were asked to jot down notes on their paper about what this plant or animal would need to live.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes of working in the small groups, we came together as a class to share our information.  I started a master list of what each group shared about their plant or animal.  When one group mentioned an item that was already on our chart, we would put a tick mark beside that item. As we created our list, we noticed that the plants and animals need many of the same things.  We talked about how scientists come to conclusions based on what they know, what they observe, research and what they learn.

Each student was then asked to write in their science notebooks what living things need to survive.

One of our goals in science if for our students to make connections from one science activity to another, from our science to their own lives and from science to other subject areas.  When we hear a child make a connection, we often jot it down on a post it note and put it in their notebook.  You can see this in the example above.

We these lessons completed, we are ready to jump head first into investigating many local living things.  More posts on living things to come.