How are Ungulates organized?

This week we started on the first of two chapters in our Land Animals book, and the kids were very excited.  These chapters get into some of their favorite animals: horses, elephants, giraffes, cows……..

About five minutes before I started the lesson I decided we needed a hands on aspect to this.  So, I did a quick image search and created herbivore animal sort.

I challenged the kids to figure out how these animals are sorted into orders.

They sat there and sorted and sorted the ungulates into all sorts of different categories.  They tried it by color, by number of legs (they very quickly figured out that didn’t work), farm animal versus wild animals, shape of the ear.

After numerous round and rounds of this, I gave them a hint: look at the feet.

That’s when it clicked.  Ungulates are sorted by the number of toes they have.  Horses, zebras, donkeys, all have 1 toe.  They are all grouped together.  Deer, cow, sheep, goat, all have two toes, they are grouped together.  This is a very rough description of it, but they got the idea pretty well with this activity.

From there we dived into elephants, but I’m holding off telling about that until I get all of the activities thought out.  I’m very tempted to head up to Waco and see the Mammoth dig site.

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

I am in love with this post from Angelicscalliwags (by the way, I think I finally figured out how to spell it by separating it into two word in my mind, Angelic Scalliwags, yes there are times I am horribly spelling challenged) on bones and how to care for a broken bone.  I love all the different ways she had her kids run through what to do in different scenarios.

No Doubt Learning has a great post on jellyfish along with some cute craft projects.  I always find jellyfish interesting.

I had a couple of others saved off, but I managed to save them and then delete them, so you’ll have to wonder who else did I think looked cool?

<div align="center"><a href="https://ticiamessing.com/category/science-sunday/" title="Science Sunday"><img src="https://i1097.photobucket.com/albums/g344/Ticia1/AiMScienceSundaycopy.jpg" alt="Science Sunday" style="border:none;" /></a></div>