Is It Living?

Hey Science Friends,

I am always on the hunt and lookout for the perfect book. You know the kind of book that can say and illustrate a concept that presents a concept that is easily understood by young learners. I am so fortunate that I work with teachers that not only share that passion but share it with me and share their books! This week we have been discussing living and nonliving and this book just added to that discussion. But what I love about the book the most is that it also lends to a discussion about offspring. 

Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow?

Our objective is to differentiate between living and nonliving things based on whether they have basic needs and produce offspring. I couldn't have been passed that book at a more perfect time because it not only added to our discussion but everyone was eager to share what they were thinking with each turn of the page. The book also gave us plenty of ideas to generate a great shared writing list and when it came time to notebook about it, we all had a lot to pull from. This year the children love notebooking in both math and science and if I tell them we are using our notebooks they are pretty excited and totally engaged.

As we were just about to leave for the week someone took note of one of the last slides we had looked at and asked...

Is that seed living or nonliving? Is that a baby apple?

This question gives us a great starting point for next week as we justify our thinking and discuss basic needs of plants and animals and examine evidence that living organisms have basic needs such as food, water and shelter for animals and air, water and nutrients, sunlight and space for plants. 

We used this PowerPoint about living and nonliving to help with our discussion and provide us with real world examples to discuss living and nonliving. Next week we will be justifying our thinking by posing the question...

How do you know?

I am sure we will all have fun discussing our favorite living and nonliving things and sharing with each other how we know it is living or not!