Teacher instructions

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

20 minutes

Tune in: Why do we Classify Living Things?

20 minutes

Find out: How do we Classify Living Things?

20 minutes

Take action: Invent an Organism

Tune in: Why do we Classify Living Things?

Step 1.

Discuss: How do we know a thing is living?

M - Movement - the organism can change its position.
R - Respiration - the organism releases energy from a 'food' source: this requires oxygen.
S - Sensitivity - the organism responds to things.
G - Growth - the organism gets bigger.
R - Reproduction - the organism can make copies of itself.
E - Excretion - the organism gets rid of waste materials.
N - Nutrition - the organism consumes chemical materials as food.

Step 2. Explain:

We don’t really know how many living things there are on Earth, although estimates suggest that in terms of mass there are around 75 billion tonnes of living things. One of the goals of science has been to understand more about these living things, and in particular their relationships between each other and their relationships with people.

The first step in understanding living things is to classify them. Classification means putting things into groups.

Step 3. Discuss:

Why do we classify things? There are generally three reasons why we classify things:

Because it makes it easier to remember organisms
So each organism has a name that is recognised around the world
So scientists in different countries can talk about the same organisms

Find out: How do we Classify Living Things?

Step 1.

Explain: because there are many many ways that we could classify living things, scientists have developed a system of taxonomy (definition: the branch of science concerned with classification). This is a hierarchical system that classifies organisms into seven levels, each of which has multiple categories.

Share the following diagram with students and explain the levels of classification:

Step 2. Watch:

An introduction to: Taxonomy (https://youtu.be/NRVJyUZoQow)

Please be aware that this video refers to the Domain level of classification - explain to students that knowledge of this level of classification is not relevant to this lesson.

Step 3.

Explain to students that the classification of organisms into Kingdoms is still being discussed and disputed by scientists. For the sake of this activity, we will presume there are five kingdoms:

Kingdom Animalia
Kingdom Plantae
Kingdom Fungi
Kingdom Protista
Kingdom Monera

Explain to students that they will be looking at some of the key features of organisms belonging to each of these Kingdoms.

Step 4.

Divide students into five groups. Give each group one of the Kingdom photo sheets - Animalia, Fungi, Monera, Plantae, Protista. Using the Kingdoms table on the Student Worksheet, ask students to work in groups to identify key features of each Kingdom and to write these features on their tables (each student should complete their own table). Allow several minutes for discussion and observation and then move the photo sheets around until all groups have seen all photo sheets.

Step 5.

Once complete, ask one volunteer from each group to come forward and describe each of the Kingdoms without stating what Kingdom they are referring to. Based on their descriptive terms, other groups will need to guess what Kingdom they are describing.

Step 6.

Working again in groups, give each group one of the Features of Kingdoms sheets. Using the table on the Student Worksheet ask groups to some notes about how different their observations about the descriptive features were to those used by scientists to identify organisms in each of the Kingdoms: which features were the same as the ones they had identified from the images? Were any the same? Why or why not?

Take action: Invent an Organism

Step 1.

Invite students to again look at the diagram of the levels of classification, highlighting the two lowest or most specific levels of organisation, the Genus and Species levels. The genus and species names together are what we call binomial nomenclature or the scientific name of an organism.

Explain to students that although most organisms have a common name these can vary according to where the organism lives. For example, in Australia we have a bird that is variously called a magpie-lark, a mudlark, a pee-wee, a peewit, or a murray-magpie depending on where in the country it is spotted in. It is in fact exactly the same bird, but it just has different common names. However, it also has a scientific name - Grallina cyanoleuca - which would be the name we would use if we wanted other people to know exactly which bird we are talking about.

Each species gets its own scientific name. The first name refers to the Genus group the species belongs to, while the second name is that species’ own name. In the case of the Grallina genus (that the magpie-lark/mudlark/pee-wee/pee-wit/murray-magpie belongs to) there is one other species in this genus, the torrent-lark (Grallina bruijni) found in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

One other thing to note is that the genus name is always capitalised (Grallina) while the species name isn’t (bruijni).

In many cases the scientific name is also used to help describe the organism in some way, or incorporates the name of a person (usually someone who helped discover or identify the organism). For example:

Trichoglossus haemotodus (Rainbow lorikeet): tricho ('hair'), and glõssa ('tongue') meaning 'hairy tongue', which they have.
Latimeria chalumnae (West Indian Ocean coelacanth): The genus name 'Latimeria' is named after museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer who recognised the first fish found as something extremely important.
Agra katewinsletae (a species of carabid beetle): named after English actress Kate Winslet.

Step 2.

Independently, students invent their own organism. Students will need to:

Provide a rough drawing of the organism with labels to show features and unique adaptations
Describe the habitat of their organism
Describe its predator-prey relationships
Include information about which Kingdom it belongs to (one of the five looked at earlier)
Give it a binomial (scientific) name and a common name

Students should create a factsheet that shares the information about their organism. Students can copy the Factsheet Template provided or create their own.

Reflection

Invite students to think about the organism they invented. What do you think the conservation status of their organism is? Is it Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered or Extinct? (Instructions also available on the Student Worksheet.)

If their organism is Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered, ask students to write a short statement that describes the main threats to this organism from human behaviour and what could be done to help protect this organism and how this would help.
If their organism is Extinct, ask students to write a short statement that describes what human behaviours contributed to its extinction and what should have been done to conserve it.

The aim of this activity is for students to think about how humans might harm species through our behaviour but also how we can help species through positive action. While students are encouraged to think of specific actions to help their organism, encourage them to also think of actions that help biodiversity on a wider scale, such as helping to slow the causes and impacts of pollution, deforestation and climate change.

Outdoor Learning - Classifying Animals by Kingdom

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