1. Pretend you are a scientist. You are a biologist who studies living things. You have come across an unknown “thing” so you will use your classification charts and observations of this thing to help identify and categorize this unknown thing. Remember that this is for pretend so go with the flow and pretend you have never seen the “thing” that in on the next slide! It is something you will all recognize immediately, so just pretend you’ve never seen something like this before. The reason I used this “thing” is so you can pretend to make observations that will help you classify the “thing”. The goal here is to learn about how a scientist classifies something and how kingdoms are divided. Using something you know with help you understand the system. So here we go! Remember to pretend that the “thing” is something you’ve never seen before and Have Fun!

2. Pretend that you and your team of biologist, have just spent months observing this creature in its natural environment. You’ve carefully taken notes about how this creature behaved, what it did, and how it interacted with the environment and other species. You have also taken careful notes about the characteristics of this animal and are able to describe how it looks compared to other known species of our world.

3. Now as a team of biologist, lets go to our resources, our flow chart, identify whether this is living or non-living.

4.  Living -made of cells, contains and uses energy, grows and develops, reproduces, responds and adapts to its environment, or  Nonliving – it is a solid, liquid gas, or plasma; and doesn’t do any of the above characteristics. So you and your team agree that this creature is living because it does all of the above.

5. Now as a team of biologist, lets go to our resources, our flow chart, identify which Kingdom this creature belongs to.

6. AAnimal PPlant FFungi PProtists MMonerans/Bacteria So as a team, and based on our collective observations of this creature we think it is an animal because it can move around on its own, it finds it’s own food, and has kittens.

7. Now as a team of biologist, lets go to our resources, our flow chart, identify which Phylum this creature belongs to.