Fun Classification/Taxonomic level activity : Homeschool fun

Wow! What a fun and effective activity today! We are using the My Father's World Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum (which we love) and today had an activity/game which illustrated the Taxonomic levels (like Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) but for the kids and their understanding, we made up our own classification system. At the end of the time, they all (7 yr old, 9 yr old, and 11 yr old) understood the importance of classification, and the process for forming and using a classification system.

Here's how it went:

I had the kids each go get 12 items from the house, whatever they wanted. They came back with a jumble of stuff, from clothing to toys to kitchen implements to a rock :) Next I told them to divide the items into only two groups. From there they divided those groups into smaller divisions, then those divisions into smaller subdivisions, and on. They did these cooperatively without me! We charted out their classification system and then they chose six items to have their siblings classify using this chart. When this was done, we did a "game" to guess what the item was when I gave them its classification. They sure enjoyed it!

For example: using their classification system a spiderman pillow was classed as:

item: pillow
classification: Cloth
non-clothing
bedroom item
non-blue item

and the dog was classified as:

item: dog
classification: non-cloth
miscellaneous
things from outdoors
non-tree product

Hope this makes sense! It was a great project and they all learned a (hopefully) lifelong lesson! Can you tell I'm a science geek that I loved this as much as them? :)

Thanks My Father's World ECC for another super fun learning activity!!