Print & Play with Living and Non-Living Things

I finally did it! I wanted to finish my Living and Non-Living pack for years…

Every year when I would see this topic on the curriculum map, I would start to plan for this week,

I know I would do a good job, but I just wanted to do it better. I mean, I am my worst critic and I always think my little loves deserve the very best.

I may have done an uncoordinated happy dance as my printer started humming…

and this is what I saw!

This pack has “printable and playable activities.” Each day we did a few cards from this huge sorting activity whole group.

Once we sorted and reasoned out the LIVING and NON-LIVING pieces, we sorted the living pieces into categories.

We figured out that living things can be animals, creepy crawlies, things that grow, and people. We could not find common ways to sort the NON LIVING things.

Here are some of the sorts included in the pack.

I love sorts because I SEE their brains working and I HEAR their discussions with their table mates as they work. They are reasoning things out in their heads and it is INCREDIBLE to be around.

Here is one of the printables for living and non-living things.

Check out the homes of these student examples of more sorts.

{We used the blue lines to help those little ones cut.}

On this sort, it was easy to place the girl and the cat on the paper. The tree wasn’t too hard, but some students didn’t know that trees do need food.

Here was the conversation I overheard. “What kind of food does a tree need… apples? Is that why they grow those apples?” “I don’t think so because some trees don’t grow apples. So they can’t eat apples.”

“Like what kind of tree?” “Like a Christmas tree… they don’t grow apples.”

Many got the bee correct too… but the apple and banana were harder. And I loved this conversation too.

“Do bananas need food and water?” “No.” “How do you know?” “How does a banana eat?” “I don’t know but it grows bigger so it has to eat.”

I love the way little learners minds work.

One of the playable activities in this pack is these scene cards.

We did these scenes during the center time last week. There are 4 different scenes therefore my students were able to choose their scene to work on. And who doesn’t like self-choice. My students circled the LIVING things with green and the NON LIVING things with red.

Since some of the circles can be hard to “read” I asked my students
what they circled when they completed this assignment.
MANY of my

did this table more than once by going to another scene. Of course, there are also printable scenes.

We did one of these scenes this morning for morning work as well. It was an awesome review.

I also put together a NEW
QR Scan & Learn~ Living and Non-Living Pack.
We will be using this this week for sure.

To connect literacy to our unit study, my

also worked on this fun LIVING and NON LIVING reader…

And I made a version with the terms NOT LIVING and another with the terms NON LIVING.

We began by reviewing the words LIVING and NON-LIVING. We colored these words with crayons since they can be hard to identify. {Plus, that NON in the term NON-LIVING can be tricky…}

Then we read the book. Once we looked at the pictures, it was easy to add the cut-apart words LIVING and NON-LIVING to their places on each page.

The words on the pages match what you are labeling…

This reader took a little while to complete,
but it was time well spent.
And my students love independent readers!
They are so proud when they use these readers during read-to-self at Daily 5! Here is the Living and Non-Living {Print & Play Pack} link.