Our Unit on Living/Non-Living/Once-Living

After our unit on matter I wanted to present the Living/Non-Living/Once-Living chapters from Karen's album. We started a while back but then we never were in the school room for a significant period, so it was never completed.  Now that  school is open here we have started on this again.

The first is the presentation of the Control Tray and the Living Tray. The control tray has the four things that all living things have in common - food, air, water and re-production. Another reason I love montessori is the use of the correct vocabulary so the child learns it and has no fear of using big words in his/her language.

Our living tray had our kitchen herbs and a couple of ants in a jar.

Next up is the abstract portion where we introduce the pictures of living things and again stress on the things that all living things have in common using the control tray.  I got these living/non-living cards from Jojoebi.

If there is a classroom pet or a plant, a care lesson for that follows. Since we already have a classroom plant, D already cares for it daily. We don't yet own a classroom pet, getting D a fish to care for is on my to-do list. For now, we have a some food a couple of drops of water for the ant.

The presentation on non-living is next. Here is our non-living tray.

And the abstract with pictures of non-living stuff.

An activity follows the non-living one. We had this polishing/cleaning rocks activity.  The container in the middle has some wet wipes.

Here is a picture of D carefully wiping the rocks!

Here is our tray for once-living.  It has a dinosaur skeleton (dollar store find) and a few flowers picked off our garden.

The activity that follows this is a mini fossil dig.  I got this little kit at lakeshore learning for a couple of dollars.

We dug out the dinosaur bones and played archaeologist! D loved every minute of it.  Here are the bones we found!

This wraps up our lesson on this unit. I loved setting up the trays and D loved the presentations! I am planning to leave the picture cards for sorting in our shelves for a few more days.