Teaching About Living and Nonliving Things

Classifying everything around us as living and nonliving is one of the first concepts we teach in early elementary science because it is so fundamentally important. Many skills are used as students inquire about characteristics of living and nonliving things. Such as classification, naming attributes, etc.

Once students have a chance to understand the characteristics of living and nonliving things. It is a perfect time to explore their environment in search of items to classify. You can go for a nature walk, keeping in mind the characteristics of living and nonliving things. It is a great time to strike up conversation for items that might be hard to classify.

You can set up various stations in your classroom. Included in my resource is a page where students will go through various old magazines and cut out items for each category. Another activity is comparing a living flower to a plastic flower using a venn diagram. I have also included a sort, an emergent reader and a writing activity.