1. Why Classify?

2. What is classification?
Organizing things based on their characteristics and placing them in groups.
Taxonomy – giving objects a name
Just definitions

3. What do we classify? Everything can be classified! Living Organisms
Animals
Plants
Bacteria
Nonliving Things
Rocks
Gems
Chemicals
We are going to learn how and why we classify living organisms!
Students brainstorm examples of things these people might classify

4. Aristotle Classified organisms by how they moved.
If they moved – Animal
If they didn’t move – Plant
If they were an animal, what was their mode of transportation?
Walking
Swimming
Flying
This was a good start, but now we know a lot more that make his classification system inaccurate. Also mention that there have been other changes, like mushrooms starting out as plants because they looked and acted like plants, but as scientists learned more about mushrooms, there were many differences like its cell wall and how it gets its food. Even now, there are changes as scientists learn more about viruses, prions, and other things that don’t exactly fit into the kingdoms of life.

5. So what’s the problem? Things that move alike may NOT be related
Things that don’t move alike may BE related
Some things don’t fit in any category
Some things can fit in several categories
Here are some examples. Have the students come up with other examples.
Example 1 – lizard and dog
Example 2 – penguin and eagle
Example 3 – Viruses
Example 4 – Seals can walk on land and swim in water

6. Then what do we do? Agree on what to look at Agree on what to call it
Change things when you find out more
Classification system – Thanks Linnaeus!
Classification key ( or dichotomous key)
Binomial nomenclature (two names)
Scientists agree to this even if they speak different languages

7. Let’s Get Started!
We are going to start classifying some Martians!