Friday, October 5, 2012

Grade 1 learns about insects and spiders

Our year-long project is based on the study of the animals of Earth. We have begun with the animals we meet up with every day in the playground, meaning the insects and spiders. We fabricated an insect vacuum which we use to look at them more closely.








Within this first unit, we have thought about classification of the animals.






We can arrange animals by:

The way they move, they fly, they walk, they run, they swim...

Next, we went to Wolf's Neck Park to meet more familiar animals

By the shape of their ears, if they can see or not...
By the presence of feathers or fur...

Yassine gave us indicators to use in classification, like real scientists...
Those which have skeletons: vertebrates 

Those without skeletons: invertebrates




Now we begin making subcategories

Within the vertebrates:
There are mammifares , in this group babies are born fully developed and can drink their mother's milk
There are ovipares where the offspring starts out in an egg outside of the mother's body



Within the invertebrates:
There are insects with 6 legs, a head, antennae, a thorax and an abdomen
There are spiders with 8 legs





We have also thought about what the farm animals give to us: milk, leather, feathers, cheese..we also grouped the animals with the products they provide.


Finally, we enter all of this information into our science notebooks.




We learn to study the animals and to regroup the essential information.
Our next step will be to meet and study the animals of Maine.