We spent the last two weeks learning about animal classification. This all came about last year when we were doing our rain forest animal reports. Many of my kids did not know the animal groups (mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and amphibians), so this year we are started off with animal classification. My students will now be ready to learn about different animals throughout the year!

We began with looking at the two major animal groups; vertebrates and invertebrates.

Normally I would have my students write under the flaps, but I think that would be tough for my crew this year, so I made cut out answers for them to glue in.

Next we spent a day each on each of the major vertebrate groups (amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles). We just learned some of the basic characteristics and did a page in our interactive notebooks about each of them.

Once we we learned each of the basic characteristics, we did a sort. I bought a bunch of play animals from Target and used some real picture from my What’s Your Class? pack.

Then, I gave them clip art animals for them to sort. We made pocket pages in our interactive notebooks.

Then we glued each of the animals onto mini popsicle sticks. I think they had about 4 or 5 animals from each group.

They loved this!

We read some great books about animal coverings (see below), so they were excite to do this page. I don’t know why I didn’t take a picture of what is under the flaps, but here is what we did.

amphibians= piece of was paper
birds- a feather
fish- a piece of orange bag (scales)
mammals- fake fur (thank you mom!)
repitles- more orange bag

As we learned about the different groups, we did a lot of comparing and contrasting using venn diagrams. I used hula hoops to make venn diagrams.

It was a great introduction to our year of explorations of animals and their adaptations! If you are interested in the animals classification pack or interactive notebook pack click below.

There is also an interactive notebook pack

Or, grab the bundle below!

Here are some great books that I used during this unit.

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