Optional Activities

• Practice your sorting more with this Biological, natural Earth, and human made sorting
• Use the "Fine Details" printable + a magnifying glass 
• Practice noticing different types of symmetry with this printable card set 
• Practice sorting living vs. nonliving and biological, natural earth, and human made with these printable cards.

• Biological: Currently alive, once was alive, a part of something living, or made exclusively by a living thing.
• Natural Earth: Materials that come from the Earth and have not been processed by humans, such as rocks, water, air, and soil.
• Human-made: Objects or materials that have been processed, shaped, or constructed by humans from natural raw materials.
• Raw material: A natural resource used as the starting point for making something.
• Conservation: Using raw materials carefully because all of them are limited and come from nature.

• When a tree dies and slowly breaks down into soil over hundreds of years, at what point did it stop being biological?
• A virus cannot make its own food and is only active inside a host. Does it meet the criteria for biological? What does your answer tell us about how we use categories?
• If humans have always used natural materials to make things, is there really a clear line between natural and human-made?

• A paper bag or pillowcase
• 10 to 12 items placed inside without the student seeing (apple or piece of fruit, rock, cotton ball, feather, metal spoon, piece of bark or small stick, dried pasta, plastic bag, seashell, small amount of soil in a zip bag, piece of glass or clear plastic wrap)
• A three-column sorting chart (columns labeled Biological, Natural Earth, Human-Made)
• Pencil

• Without looking inside, reach into the bag and pull out one item at a time. Before setting it down, describe what you feel: texture, weight, shape.
• Place each item in one of the three columns on your sorting chart. Write down one reason for your choice.
• After sorting all items, look for any that made you hesitate. Discuss why those were harder.
• Find at least one item that fits more than one category. Explain why both descriptions are true.
• For each human-made item, trace it back to its raw natural source. Where did it originally come from?
• Discuss: is there anything in the bag that did not come from nature originally? Can you find a single item that humans created entirely from scratch?