Unit 2 Looking at Living Things

Topic

The diversity of forms among living things

Curriculum Link

2.1 Living things: characteristics of living things
2.3 Diversity of plant and animal life: diversity of forms

Estimated Lesson Time

80 minutes

Introduction

Diversity of forms exits among living things. For example, different living things use different means to communicate, such as dolphins used ultrasound and limbs whereas firefles emit light. The living things possess special structures for their specific functions.

In this activity, student will explore some examples of communication of living things. Recently, some British scientists found out that horses communicate by ears and eyes instead of speech like human. Meanwhile, horses are selected as the sample to study their ways of communication in an inquiry approach. Students are encouraged to propose ways and figure out how to testify their ideas.

Key Question

How do different living things communicate?

Learning Objectives

In this activity, the students should be able to

  1. recognise different ways that living things adopt for communication and the diversity of forms among living things (SP 2);
  2. hypothesise the possible means of horses for communication and testify the suggested means with scientific method (SP 3);
  3. analyse and interpret data to draw a conclusion (SP 5);
  4. construct a dichotomous key to identify (SP 2).

Teaching Plan

Task (Time) Brief Description Materials Objectives

Engagement
(15 min)
  • Teacher engages the class by showing the two videos and asking the students about the communication means of (i) dolphin and (ii) firefly
  • Teacher concludes that different living things use different ways to communicate. This reflects that living things have different body structures for signal transmission and are able to receive and react to these signals, which is one of the characteristic of living things.
 (1)

Exploration
(20 min)
  • Students explore how horse communicates and then design their experiment to testify their ideas in a group.
  • Students present their ideas and receive feedbacks from their peers and teachers. During the process, students are required to identify the variables which have learnt in the previous chapter.
  • Teacher can encourage the students to brainstorm their ideas with feasible experimental design.
 (2)

Evaluation
(10 min)
  • Students briefly present their design and evaluate each other's work.
  • Teacher can be the facilitator to evaluate and guide the class to design correctly.
 (2) & (3)

Exploration & Explanation
(25 min)
  • Students explore the set-up done by the scientists.
  • Teacher asks the student to explain the principle of design.
    • Set-up 1:

      Scientists placed two buckets of crops and one horse picture in between. A horse is allowed to choose any bucket of crops.

    • Set-up 2:

      Scientists repeated set-up 1 but covered the ear of the horse picture.

    • Set-up 3:

      Scientists repeated set-up 1 but covered both the eyes of horse picture.

  • Students analyse the data and draw the conclusion.
 (2) & (3)

Elaboration
(10 min)
  • Students elaborate additional set-up to strengthen their conclusion just made.
  • Students construct a dichotomous key to classify the four living things based on the external features related to communication learnt in the lessons.
 (4)