Best Biology Project Ever

Back to the Vivarium.  Now, I consider myself to be a bit of a science buff, so my brain freeze on amphibians and mammals was a bit embarrassing.  Nothing google couldn’t straighten me out on though.  And in the mean time, I developed my Best Biology Project Ever (BBPE).

The BBPE is a simple system for organizing animals we come across, whether outside or in Eliot’s My Big Backyard magazine, into their appropriate phylum, class, and eventually, order.  For now, we’ve kept it simple.  I bought a binder, then recycled some old dividers, labeling one Vertebrates (Chordata phylum) and the other Invertebrates (all those other annoying phylum).  Under the vertebrate tab went 5 large manila envelopes for the five classes of vertebrates- fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals.  Under invertebrates, I have only made insects and arachnids, both part of the arthropod phylum.  We’ll expand out the invertebrates as we move along in the project.  In addition, certain classes, like insects, will end up with smaller envelopes labeled with the most popular orders.

It took us about 45 minutes to put this together.  Eliot used scissors and glue to organize our pictures onto construction paper (color coded), I labeled the envelopes, and we then classified all of our vertebrates.  When we got to a hard animal, like a dolphin, we talked about why it went with the mammals, and not the fish.  

Next month, we’ll get another magazine in the mail.  We’ll read it for a week, then cut it up and classify the animals, creating new envelopes for any new invertebrates who might wander across our path. 

In six months, we might take out all the animals in a folder, say, mammals, and compare and contrast them.  With a little guidance, Eliot might notice that they all have hair or fur, that they have live births, and that they nurse their young.  As he begins to determine for himself the official characteristics that distinguish mammals, we’ll mark them down on the mammals envelope.  And then another week,we might attack the reptiles, or fish. 

In a few years, as our collection expands, I think he will have the following concepts:

• Classification by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family,  genus, and species (basic taxonomy)
• Memorization of the 5 classes of vertebrates and several classes of invertebrates
• Memorization of several orders of insects, and the ability to classify a specimen into one of those orders
• Implicit understanding of a nested hierarchy system (dividers, large envelopes, smaller envelopes, stapled “families”, last names (genus) and first names (species))
• Expertise in cutting and gluing
• Sight read many of the names and categories
• A base of latin word roots

And that is a very, very strong base for understanding middle-level concepts (inference and prediction), like ecological niche, biodiversity, adaptation, food chains and webs.  And he will also have an excellent knowledge base for the advanced and abstract concepts of conservation, ecology, interdependence, natural selection, evolution, and genetics.  

Does taxonomy matter?  Well, I was taught taxonomy in AP biology, and university level biology.  What is silly is that it is (rather, was, until geneticists got involved) a low level field of biology.  It is a lot of memorization and classification, something a 5 year old, or even 3 year old, is more capable of doing than a 20 year old.  (No, really, a 5 year old has the best memory he will ever have in his life.  Don’t believe me?  Challenge a five year old to a game of Memory!)  But the information is absolutely necessary to build the rest of biology upon.  So why teach 5 year olds about the sad pandas that are going extinct, a concept so abstract as to be almost meaningless to a child (and therefore more akin to indoctrination than education) when he is much more capable and interested (Eliot LOVES his binder) of doing taxonomy- the basic building block of all biology?

Someday when Eliot is in an advanced biology class, and this information is covered, it will not be some boring flow chart to be memorized.  It will be a specific folder, under a specific tab, in his green binder, on the left side of the second shelf of his bookshelf.  It will be concrete.

And here are a few final thoughts on the BBPE:

• It is a fun craft project involving glue (I have not worked out a way to incorporate glitter yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something)
• In the summer, a child could photograph local fauna (or flora, for a plant binder), and in the winter, magazines can be cut up for images
• It takes 45 minutes to put the basics together, and probably cost us less than $5.
• It will now take about 15 minutes a month to add images, and another 30 minutes or so, spread out, to talk about this or that, or to pull out the binder to illustrate a question that might come up. 
• It is expandable- this project can be built upon for the next 12 years or his education. 
• It can be modified, to make it more challenging (field guides to give scientific names to the animals, studying those pesky invertebrate classes in more depth, etc.)
• It can be used to illustrate middle-level concepts- pull out a handful of images form each envelope, and create a food web or biome, compare the characteristics of reptiles and birds and try to determine why genetics tells us they are closely related in evolutionary terms, etc. 
• It takes up almost no space- it just goes on the bookshelf when not in use. 
• It takes so little time that homeschoolers or out-of-home schoolers can work on it with their parents. 
• Taxonomy is, at the basic level, very easy to do.  Parents with no biology background can easily master the characteristics of the 5 vertebrate classes and a few invertebrate classes, and go from there, learning with their child.  By pausing to look up an animal in a field guide or on the internet (as I did with seahorses), your child sees how knowledge can be gathered from various resources.

For all I know, everybody and their brother has a taxonomy binder.  But I’ve never heard of one.  If you’ve already seen something like this, feel free to send me a link.  I’d love to refine our system if improvements exist.