New Provocation 'What is an animal'

This week we started a new Provocation, 'What is an Animal' this leads into our trip to Orana Park in a few weeks. One of the 'big ideas' in Science that we started to think about this week was how scientist classify animals into different groups according to certain characteristics. We began to explore this understanding by thinking about how we would group animals that we were familiar with. Eli said 'I put the cow and the human in the same box as humans eat cows' when I questioned him further and asked if that is something that is similar about them, 'do cows eat humans?' I asked. 'Ahh no, that wouldn't be good, I think I will change that!' Eli replied. Many children grouped the animals according to the physical features of the animals as presented in the picture, 'I put the fish and the cat together as they both have a bit of grey on them' Zoe stated. I put the dog, cat, rabbit and human together cos the human would have them as pets' Brooklyn said. From these observation I could see that our next steps would be to investigate some sub categories within the animal world and look into what makes a reptile a reptile etc

In our reading groups we read via the  national geographic kids site about different animals. For writing we used the information we learnt to create descriptions and in our maths work on statistics we organised animals into a Venn diagram and took a photo of it, imported it into explain everything and talked about what the diagram showed. Next week we will start to explore and learn more about the animals that we have selected.