Unit 2 Reflections: How Can We Organize Living Things?

In unit 2, there are a few activities that I was having a hard time conceptualizing from the teacher notes.  This was one of them.  I had no idea what "Flinn Organism Cards" were, but I took a leap of faith and ordered them.  When they arrived, I was still unsure of how this lesson was going to work.  It was one of those moments when I was truly wishing I had attended a biology-specific modeling seminar before trying to dive into this curriculum head first.

It turns out "Flinn Organism Cards" are actually a dichotomous key lab kit, although they aren't actually used for that purpose.  The kit includes 5 identical decks of 60 cards portraying organisms from all the kingdoms.  Each card includes some basic information about the organism, including name, cell type, how it obtains energy, reproductive strategy, etc.
 

The plan is extremely open ended:  open the lesson by asking how diverse is life, then give each group a deck with the protists and fungi cards removed (note:  I actually gave each group 1/2 a deck so I would have enough cards for 8 groups of 4).  If they don't start grouping them on their own, suggest that they should.  That's it.  After you discuss their groupings, you give them the protist and fungi cards, then discuss again.  Color me skeptical...

Back tracking for a moment:  when I first read through the unit 2 materials, I decided to add in a quick review of organelles and prokaryote/eukaryote prior to this lesson.  I'm not sure if the curriculum intended for the students to discover these different cell types through this classification activity.  The later exercises make reference to prokaryote/eukaryote, so obviously they're supposed to learn the terms somehow.  My thought process was that I wanted to focus this lesson on classification and not be drawn off track by trying to interpret new and important words.  My cell coverage was truly a mini-lesson/review, since unit 5 is devoted to cell structure and function.  We spent maybe half of a block on it at most immediately prior to this activity.

Looking back, I'm glad I did it that way.  Like, "best decision I made all week" glad.  I imagine without knowing the terms prokaryote and eukaryote, I may have seen some more, um, "creative" grouping strategies.  In my opinion, that would have been time not well utilized.  It seemed quite effective when they were all confident with their initial groups (prokaryote, animal, plant... BOOM, we aced this!), then to throw them for a loop when they received the protist and fungi cards.  They had to read the new cards carefully to discover the fine differences, which led them to changing their minds about their previous groupings that they were oh-so-sure about.  It was pretty easy to leap into 5 (well, 6) kingdoms from that point.

I actually made a PowerPoint for tomorrow-- gasp!  I haven't used a PowerPoint yet this year!  But it's only 6 slides:  My reasoning was that I wanted to make sure they get the correct terminology copied down.  I figure I'll have the PowerPoint up during our post-discussion.  Today we got as far as identifying 5 (6) potential groups, but we did not get to go into detail.  Exercise 2 asks for some venn diagrams comparing and contrasting the kingdoms.  Without some note-taking framework, I was worried some students may not voluntarily record enough information to be successful on that activity.

We're also supposed to do some more model deployment on classification at the phylum level and downward tomorrow... I still haven't quite wrapped my head around this activity.  I know I have some animal kingdom cards and a rather cryptic looking tree of the animal kingdom phyla.  I understand what to do with the cards, I'm just not exactly sure how I'm to utilize that dang tree... are they supposed to receive it prior, during, or after the activity?  I might save it for after...