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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

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.

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