Visit Three: Animal Classification ~ Kara Leigh's Arts Bridge Experience

Visit Three: Animal Classification {Day 1}

This was the first day in a three part project dealing with the science topic: Animal Classification. The children needed to understand how to classify animals by characteristics such as warm or cold blooded, environment, type of young, habitat, etc. We read a short story about different animal groups: amphibian, reptile, mammals, birds, fish, etc. I explained that we would be imagining that we discovering a new animal that no one had seen or heard of. The basic outline of this project is as follows:

Day 1) Imagining/brainstorming a unique animal and drawing the animal in crayons (planning day)

Day 2) Molding animals with air dry clay

Day 3) Painting animals and decorating diorama habitats

Day 1:

In order to help the first graders learn more about what makes animals different/similar, I created a short workbook for them to use to create details for their new animal. This consisted of questions prompting them for what group their animal was, what color, what size, where it lived, what it ate, etc. As a part of this they had to come up with a completely new name for their animal. Some struggled with this, but upon prompting we had some amazing names like; Emolgy, Nebula, and Rozz.

You can find my lesson plan for this three part lesson, as well as the template for the Animal Discovery Journal:

Lesson Three: Animal Habitats & Classification

They spent about 25 minutes just drawing their animal. I asked them to add in details that they had come up with in their Discovery Journal, like what it eats and where it lives. Here are the pictures they came up with. I call it Mrs. Ackley's First Grade Zoo!