Kindergarten Science – Classifying Animals

Last week, ED spent some time learning about the different animal groups — mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. We talked about some of the different characteristics of each group and she spent time separating them into the different categories.

We have a number of different activities and she spent several days going through our various activities:

One was from a book called Take It to Your Seat Science Centers and she had to group the pictures into animals that have fur, feathers or scales.

Another sort she did was from File Folder Fun (it’s free) and she had to divide the animals into mammals, reptiles and birds:

We also pulled out the forest animal Montessori cards I made a while back and she sorted through those. These didn’t have any pictures of fish and also had some invertebrates.  I forgot to get a picture of ED sorting them this time, but I’m putting in a couple old pictures.

Vertebrate-Invertebrate Animal Sort – and the Five Animal Groups

Forest Animals Sort: You can visit this old post on vertebrates and invertebrates to download these cards :

I mentioned a month or so ago that I purchased a science book for her kindergarten-science this year called Cut-and-Paste Science.  I pulled out a couple activities for her from there and she did those as well:

We also read a few books over the course of the week. I can’t remember exactly what they were called — one was on reptiles, one was on frogs, a couple were on mammals and I think we read a couple other books as well.

That was about it for her kindergarten science. Now we’ve moved on to a new unit that we’re doing all together on Simple Machines, Gizmos and Gadgets, Inventions and more!

You might also be interested in these related posts:

Classifying animals into the vertebrate and invertebrate groups.  I shared the links to those free Montessori cards there as well.

Meet Vertebrae Man: Our Hands-On Exploration of the Backbone and Nervous System: We did an activity that shows what the vertebrae look like and how they work: (Oops, sorry the pic is on its side. I’ll try to fix that soon!)