Classification: Doodads and Gismos

A selection of everyday objects have been given silly names and your students need to use a dichotomous key to determine which name belongs with which object. 

The objects you'll need are (and you don't even need all of them, use the ones you already have around):

• Snap wooden clothespin
• Sharpened pencil
• Unsharpened pencil
• Wire coat hanger
• Metal fork
• Metal knife
• Metal spoon
• Bolt
• Nickel
• Penny
• Small paperclip
• Jumbo paperclip
• Paper fastener
• White shirt button
• White paper plate
• White piece of chalk
• Whilte plastic fork
• White plastic knife
• White plastic spoon
• White candle
• White soap

You can access the complete dichotomous key here. 

There are a couple of ways you can use this activity:
~Provide each group of students with a set of objects and have each student identify the name of every object (or a specified number of objects).
~Provide each student with one object and have them each identify the name of that one object.  This works well as a quick assessment tool.

There are a few things I really like about this particular activity:
~There's some similarities between the objects (lots of utensils, lots of white objects, etc.), which means students need to work through the key carefully.
~The dichotomous key includes extra names, which means students really have to work their way through the key for each object; they can't rely on the process of elimination.