Order of Life Science Materials

Recently I was asked about the order for presenting the cultural materials. There are many different orders, when I trained 3-6 I took one way and for the 6-9 another. The below is the order that I feel works best for the children and gives the a solid understanding of life sciences.

1. Living and non-living with objects:

Activity: Children gather objects from around the class or garden and place them under the heading cards.

2. Living and non-living with picture cards.

Activity: Children sort the pictures and put them under the headings.

3. Living, non-living and once living.

Activity: Children gather objects for each heading. The teacher explains the concept of once living.
4. Plant kingdom and Animal kingdom:

Activity: Teacher explains that living things can be divided into kingdoms. Most of the living things belong to the plant or animal kingdoms [I do explain that their are also other kingdoms but go into details later on]. I use pictures for this activity and the children sort them and place them under the headings 'plant kingdom' or 'animal kingdom'

Next we take each kingdom and look at the divisions within it. For example the animal kingdom:

5. Vertebrates and Invertebrates:

Activity: For this I use 3 part cards, and information card and objects.

6. Classification of Animal kingdom 2 : vertebrates

Activity: The children match the pictures and objects for the different animal groups in the vertebrates. After this they can go onto study the parts of the body for each group and then the life cycles.
7. Classification of Animal Kingdom 1: Invertebrates

This is done the same as above.

I have all these activities as PDF files as well as the body part cards and life cycles cards. You can get them here.