I promised the other day to show you something we’ve been working on in school.  These pictures aren’t fancy, but this is what our work really looks like in use!

Studying Animal Classes

I’m working this year primarily with a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old.  (The older girls don’t work as closely with me on most subjects.)  Both of them can read, but not necessarily very quickly and fluently yet (especially the 5-year-old).  So as we’ve been studying the traits of various animal classes, I wanted them to have something visual to add to their pages to help them better see “at a glance” what they’d listed.

Our solution was to brainstorm simple “icons” — little stick figure-y sorts of drawings — that represented each trait.  (Some were harder than others.  “Gives birth to live young” is a bit tough to create a simple icon for when you want it kid-friendly.)  Some of them are more of a stretch than others, but since we were already making word-based lists, they’re close enough; we know what they mean.  Here’s what we came up with:

Mammals

Mammals presented a particular challenge with both “births live young” and “nurses its young.”  We opted for a sort of “stick animal”-type uterus with a blobby “baby animal” inside, and a “stick udder.”

Birds

You’ll notice some duplication as we go through.  That was intentional.  We wanted to make sure the images would allow us to compare and contrast.  All the animals that breathe with lungs, for instance, have the same symbol.  (The warm- and cold-blooded symbols can be placed inside a blood drop if you like.  I have one kiddo who did this and one who didn’t find it necessary.)

Fish

Gills are not easy to draw as an icon, y’all.  We finally settled on these parentheses-looking things because they sort of mimic the shape of the gill slits on the sides of the fish’s head.  And I made them “inside-out” from parentheses mostly so we could tell they aren’t parentheses.

Amphibians

Smooth, moist skin is not easy to draw, either.  That drawing is supposed to be smooth skin (the double line) with a water droplet on it to indicate the “moist.” (We forgot to draw the vertebrate symbol on this one.  It looks like we also forgot to note that most of them lay eggs.  We must have been in a hurry that day.  Or we got really distracted trying to figure out how to draw skin.  Sorry!)

Reptiles

The dry, scaly skin here is probably easier to recognize in contrast with the smooth, moist skin on the amphibian slate.

Let’s talk about nictitating membranes.  First of all, the fact that either I flaked and misspelled “membranes” on our board, or my handwriting is really bad.  Also, I didn’t know what a nictitating membrane was until we studied reptiles last week.  In case that’s you, too, let me enlighten you so the icon will (maybe) make sense.  Nictitating membranes are clear eyelids that many reptiles have underneath or in place of their regular eyelids.  This allows them to close their eyes but still see if they’re underwater, in a desert sandstorm, etc.  As I told my children, they’re kind of like windshields for the reptiles’ eyeballs.  (My 7-year-old actually referred to them as “the windshield things” because she, understandably, couldn’t remember the official name.)

Since I can’t begin to imagine how to draw something clear, we decided to just go with a simple eye instead, to convey the idea that they can keep their eyes open.

Future Plans, and a Funny

We still have invertebrates left to study, and I think we will be creating little sketches like this for those, too.  When we’re done, the plan is to create cards for each of the icons, so the kids can sort through them and pull out the ones that go with each class.

As we sat yesterday and talked about snakes, we learned that, although most reptiles lay eggs, some snakes give birth to live young.  Apparently this distinction finally clicked with my son (the 5-year-old) who was, along with his older sisters, here when his baby sister was born.  As we talked about garter snakes and rattlesnakes, he suddenly piped up excitedly, “Shoshannah’s live young!”  Probably not how I would have thought to put that, but he’s not wrong!