It's Time for Round Two

The second group presented Life Science.  This group focused on classifying different things.  They had a great opening activity were they group the people in the room into two different groups, then they broke those groups into more groups.  First, it was by college students and elementary students.  Then, within those groups we separated into groups with buttons on their shirts and without.  Last, those new groups were separated into people who can roll their tongues and people who can't.  So we started out with 2 groups and ended with 8 groups.  The groups started with teaching variations, species, traits and classify to the students.  They then taught the students about dichotomous key.  They had the students repeat that word through out the lesson which was a great way for them to remember the word. They used a great video on the dichotomous key.  Then, they reviewed the vocabulary words that were used through out the lesson.  The guided practice was based on how to use a dichotomous key using leaves.  The group called students to the board to help them classify the leaves.
The inquiry lesson was on using the dichotomous key.  The students were given a bag of jelly beans that had both good tasting beans and bad tasting beans.  The idea came for the Harry Potter and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.  The students had to use a dichotomous key to classify the jelly beans without tasting or smelling the beans.  They students were very engaged in this activity.  They took the dichotomous key very seriously because no one wanted to eat a vomit flavored jelly bean.  This group did a great job at keeping the students engaged and focused on the subject at hand.