Animal Features (And Who Are You Calling A Troglodyte?!)

Here are two classifying activities which encourage primary students to hone in on the structural features and adaptations of different animals that help them to survive in their environments.  (Year 5, Australian Curriculum)

The first is a classic animal sort activity using plastic toys from Kmart, but I also added photos of us and our dog to the mix (just to see if my sons could resist classifying each other as troglodytes).

My primary-aged kids are beyond simple land/water/air sorting so for this we used a chart from the Oxford Primary Illustrated Science Dictionary.

They didn't spend long on this activity, just enough time to figure out that all the insects in the bowl were arthropods.

For the second activity I selected some land and sea shells from our nature tray and challenged the boys to classify them using the Molluscs of Tasmania website.

Next we took a wonderful trip to Seahorse World, where we found out seahorses are tough little critters with both a spine and an exoskeleton!

As luck would have it, our friends invited us to the Brightside Farm Sanctuary (by appointment only) so we were able to investigate the features of camels and other fascinating rescue animals.

I'm not sure how much of what we learnt has stuck, but the boys certainly won't forget that 'benthic' means 'bottom-dwelling' (they thought that was hilarious).

Do you have any classifying activities to share?  Can you recommend any interesting field trips?  We'd love to know about it in the comments.

Thanks for reading.  If you liked this post about animal features, you might also like exploring the features of plants through this Cacti Invitation.  For another activity using shells, try Aboriginal-Inspired Shell Necklaces!