Who Am I? For America!!

Only a handful of kids took the approach of answering the question
in the lesson title, but I was a big fan of how that turned out!

 This week we lead our second classroom visits with the 4th graders from our SEEDS4: Nature Detectives partnership! We developed a lesson with activities to teach them about classification systems while continuing to build upon their observation skills that they have been working on all year. They were first presented with a bag containing eight office supplies and asked to sort them into categories on a piece of paper and to label them. Most groups had similar ideas about how to group things that were valid ideas but weren't all that creative our "out of the box", but there were a few who impressed me with their thought process. (I've included pictures of those below)

The next activity involved looking at a pinned insect and recording detailed observations and a drawing in their Nature Journal. They have all been learning to make detailed observations of plants and such through lesson plans that we have created for them, but those were primarily of plants. The idea was that students had to describe their insect in a detailed way that would make sense to me if I were an alien. (Saying that their insect looks like a butterfly would not be valid because I, an alien, would have no idea what that meant). I have included a few pictures of some of the better student work!
How Neat Is That?!

I LOVED this little girl's drawings of her praying mantis. It was entirely her own idea to draw it from various perspectives.

This kid did an AWESOME job with his labeled dragonfly drawing!

This photo was of my favorite and most out-of-the-box thinking group's categories. They noticed that a lot of the objects could be placed into multiple categories, so they did exactly that. The glue belongs to the "white" category, the "sticky" category, and the "blue" category; and, the pen belongs to the "blue" and the "writing utensils" categories. I'm a big fan of the way they set I up, having the items that fit into multiple categories laying within the bounds of each corresponding circle.

This group created a things that write and a metal things category and decided to lay the pen across to connect the two because the inside of the pen has metal in it.

This group created a little Venn Diagram for things that can write and metal things (the inside of the pen containing metal)