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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Organisms and environments. The student knows that the environment is composed of relationships between living organisms and nonliving components.

Provide students with images of both living and nonliving things. Students will draw a T-chart in their notebook, label one side living and the other nonliving, and sort the images into the correct category. Students should write a sentence or use a sentence frame to explain how they know some things are living and others are nonliving. Students will share their sort and read their sentences to a peer. Student products should use demonstrate that they understand that living things need air, water, food, shelter, and space to thrive. Nonliving things do not have these requirements. Students should also show that they understand that living things can reproduce.
 

requirements for life, such as air, water, food, protection, and space

the circumstances, objects, or conditions that surround an organism including abiotic (climate and soil) and biotic (living organisms) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival

organisms within an ecosystem that are alive or were alive; such as plants, animals, and bacteria

describes components of an ecosystem that are not and never were alive, such as water, soil, and atmosphere

Research

"Legaspi, Britt, and William Straits. “Living or Nonliving?” Science and Children 48, no. 8 (2011): 27–31.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43176201. 

Summary: Students often use their personal experience to determine whether or not something is living and may believe that all things can move and have feelings. This journal article outlines young students' common misconceptions about what classifies something as living or nonliving. The article suggests asking probing questions to see what students believe the criteria for living things are rather than just telling them the criteria. Students need to observe living and nonliving things first-hand and record and categorize what they see. As a class, students should discuss what living and nonliving they observed and try to find commonalities between the objects/organisms.