Week 2

1/30/2025

This week I learned more about the eight core characteristics for living things. I connected each characteristic with an example of a living thing to better help myself understand. Additionally I learned how it takes all eight core characteristics to make something a living thing. We looked at how a virus is not a living thing because it does not fall under all eight core characteristics. On top of that I learned about the structure of an argument using a claim, evidence, and reasoning when explaining why a virus was not a living thing. 

This week I was able to take what was taught in lecture last week and apply it with an anchor chart alongside my table mates. In last week's lecture we went over the eight core characteristics for living things. Those eight include cellular composition, maintaining homeostasis, maintaining internal state, growth and change, movement, responding to stimuli, genetics and heredity, metabolism, and reproduction. In our anchor chart we used a butterfly as our example of a living thing. It was nice to visually see all eight steps with examples/explanations of the characteristic it went with.

I now thoroughly understand the eight core characteristics for living things and it will help me be a better educator when teaching my students on the topic. The anchor chart that my group mates and I created gave me an insight of a type of anchor chart that might hang on my wall for my future students to reference. Something else I might do in the future is have my students complete the activity I did in class with the anchor charts to ensure they understand the process of the eight core characteristics. 




Comments

  1. AnjaJanuary 30, 2025 at 11:27 AM

    Kamryn,
    I appreciate your insight on this week's learning. I love the Anchor chart that our group made and the different colors. I think that making more charts like this in our future classrooms will help our students to visually see all the different characteristics. I was also able to relate what we learned last week about the characteristics of living things to what we learned this week.

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  2. morgan crismanJanuary 30, 2025 at 11:37 AM

    Hi Kamryn,
    I really enjoyed your blog post! I liked how you showed and talked about your characteristic of living things poster, I thought it was a really helpful tool in lab this week. I also liked how you said that what you learned so far in class will help you be a better educator in the future, and I agree! I plan on using a lot of the activities we are doing in lab in my future class. Thanks for your post!

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  3. Izzy S.February 2, 2025 at 2:07 PM

    Hi Kamryn! I really enjoyed reading your post! I really like the design of your poster for the characteristics of living things! I agree that anchor charts can be super helpful for students to understand the 8 characteristics and I hope to bring this into my classroom!

    ReplyDelete

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