Grouping living things

Think of a supermarket. If everything were thrown in one heap, finding a sack of rice would take hours. Because rice, fruit and cold drinks each have their own section, you walk straight to the rice. Grouping makes things easy to find and easy to study.

There are far too many kinds of plants and animals to study one by one. So we put them into groups by their similarities and differences. The book calls this arranging by common features grouping. For example, animals with hair on their bodies that feed their young on milk can go in one group. Name the group, and you already know two things about every animal in it.

Plants can be grouped by many features: tall or short; a hard stem or a soft one; the shape of the leaves and how they are arranged; with flowers or without. In tulsi, a pair of leaves grows in opposite directions. In common grass, a single leaf grows from different points on the stem.

Animals can be grouped by what they eat, where they live, their colour and how they move. In the book's table, a crow lives on a tree. An ant lives in a nest in the soil and in burrows. Fish live in water. Frogs live on land as well as in water.

In one activity, different groups of students sorted the same picture cards in different ways. One group used the height of the plants; another used whether the plants had flowers. Both are fine. You can choose different bases, as long as you use the same basis for the whole sorting.