MAKING SENSE OF THE LIVING WORLD: LEVEL 2

ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Students can

use differences and similarities in external characteristics to distinguish broad groups of living things, e.g., mammals, frogs, fish, birds, insects, spiders, worms, snails; flowering plants, ferns, mosses;
investigate and understand the general functions of the main parts of animals and plants, e.g., skin, legs, ears, eyes, heart, stomach, brain, bones, tail, wings; seeds, roots, flowers, cones;
investigate and understand the changes that take place in animals and plants during their life cycles, e.g., metamorphosis in butterflies, beetles, and frogs; farm animals; flowering plants;
investigate the responses of plants or animals, including people, to environmental changes in their habitats, e.g., seasonal changes in deciduous trees, bird migration, plants grown in sun and shade, hibernation.

Students could be learning by:

establishing some of the criteria which help to distinguish fish, birds, and insects, and New Zealand trees and ferns;
drawing different animals that they have found in the school playground;
sharing their ideas about the differences between ferns, mosses, and flowering plants;
making a collage of pictures of human body parts on a body outline to show the positions of the main organs;
preparing the questions to ask a visiting expert about how major internal body organs help us to live;
collecting a variety of edible plants and identifying which parts of the plant are edible;
observing and recording the life cycle of an animal to show that changes occur, e.g., frogs, huhu beetles, monarch butterflies, garden snails;
experimenting to find out how plants respond when they are exposed to different light conditions, e.g., wandering Willie, bean seedlings;
growing a variety of vegetables and flowers to learn about the needs of plants;
finding out what happens to the animals in a forest when the trees are cut down;
reading or writing stories about animals which hibernate in the colder weather.

Teachers and students could assess the students':

understanding of the major animal and plant sets, when the students collect pictures and make pictorial identification charts of these;
knowledge of the position and function of lungs and heart, when the students draw diagrams and write simple explanations of these;
knowledge of the main parts of a flowering plant, when the students label a diagram correctly;
knowledge of the relationship of the life cycle of a particular animal with the passage of time, when the students draw an annotated diagram of this;
observation, measuring, and systematic recording skills, when the students keep a diary recording the growth of a plant over a period of a term;
inquiry skills, when they investigate and report the responses of a number of plants of the same species put into differing light conditions.