We are still continuing our vertebrate study and at this point we explored the life cycle of each group. The aim of this study is to compare the life cycle of each group, to differentiate their development and identify their similarities as well.
Prior to this, I introduced the Animal Kingdom and the Vertebrate group.
To start off, we have The Life Cycle of a Frog for amphibians. Printable materials used here are my Animal Kingdom file, Vertebrate Sorting Cards and the Animal Life Cycles FREE printable. The link of the file is at the end of this post.
I have the life cycle figures to represent the pictures. My son loooves them!
And I have my son name all the amphibians that he can remember. I place the pictures on the left and their life cycle on the right.
Here, we concluded that:
Amphibians have jelly-life eggs.
They lay their eggs in the water.
They don't look like their parents when they are born.
They have silky slimy and sometimes toxic skin.
Next is we have the birds. Same process he has to name any birds and then we talk about The Life Cycle of a Chicken.
As you can see, our Baby Bear is participating as well :)
After the discussion of the life cycle, we concluded that:
Birds have hard shells.
They lay their eggs on nest or in soft area and keeps them warm.
They look like their parents when they are born.
Their skin is covered with feathers.
Reptiles are my son's favourite group because dinosaurs belong here. We talked about The Life Cycle of a Snake and see how it differs with the other groups.
Here we concluded that:
They have hard leathery like egg shells.
They lay their eggs on land.
They look like their parents when they are born (hatchlings).
They have scaly hard skin.
Then we have the fish and we talked about the Life Cycle of a Salmon to represent this group.
My file includes the order of the cycle and also a brief description of each stage.
Here we concluded that:
Fish lay eggs in the water.
Salmons have food sac when they're still young.
They have gills and scaly skin.
And the last is the Life Cycle of a Dog for the mammals. My camera's batter ran out already so I wasn't able to take a picture.
Here we concluded that:
Mammals are born as their parent's young. Meaning they look exactly the same as their parents. Not in an egg form but a little version of their Mommies and Daddies.
Mother feed their youngs with their milk.
Mammals have furry or hairy skin that protects them.
At the end of our session, I gave him all the picture cards of the life cycle and asked him to arrange them in order. Sorry the picture is not really clear as this was taken via my phone. Here you can see that the child can easily differentiate how this animal groups differ from each other via their life cycle.
Materials used here are:
All Safari Toobs in my Amazon My Favourites (located in my sidebar).
Insect Lore Life Cycle of a Frog
Animal Kingdom file and Vertebrate Sorting Cards
And Animal Life Cycles which you can download for free by clicking the image below. Please note that the file doesn't include the definition cards for the insects as we are not touching this subject at the moment. But I will definitely share the insect portion once we have our Insect Study in June.
Sorry if this is such a long post! I just have to explain and show how we used the file :) Thank you so much for your time and I hope you find it useful in your school and at home.
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