Love to Investigate - Why are things classified?

Lesson: Science

Class: Year 6 Year: 2022 - 2023

Research

Today we reserached Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) - he laid the foundations for traditional classification and binomial naming systems. This is a clear way of defining something by it's physical features. There are three main types of classification keys - branched, dichotomous and tabular. We created our own Arctic animal classification branching keys last week. Today the advances in DNA technology mean that more and more living things are being reclassified according to similarities in DNA and not their physical features.

Love To Investigate

Can all things be classified? We predicted what we thought - most of us decided eveything can be classified as all things are different. We thought about classifying animals, numbers, colours, games and even pasta! Once we had predicted we practiced classifying our teachers, teaching assistants, lunch time teachers, school bursar, supervisor and the ladies who keep our school clean! We found this fun! Then it was our turn, in groups we classified each person in our class. We used the method: everyone has something unique about them. 

Results

We found that all things can be classified because everything has a unique characteristic.