We’re All Related
Field Trips for All of Us: Transformational Activities for Children and Their Adults
Note: For now, this blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.
Introduction
As I mention in the Nature Tag - Tree Tag Version field trip, naming things and beings is the beginning of forming relationships with them. Classifying living beings expands on naming them and shows how we are all related while also putting us humans in our rightful place among many species of animals. This and most of the field trips in this blog are suitable for people of all ages. Like other field trips presented here, it works well for young learners as it embodies our senses and motor skills to relate with some aspect of nature, in this case, various living beings. This field trip also has extensions for older learners that include the possibility of representing and describing different living beings. Other extensions include doing an index card local taxonomy wall, developing a local field guide, creating care and feeding pages for various organisms, and developing a formal taxonomy table of the living beings in your home ecosystem.
Activity
The core of this activity is to help your child(ren) find five different kinds of living things. Ideally, these five different beings will include at least one from each of the three macroscopic (i.e., visible) kingdoms: animals, fungi, and plants. The fungi can be in the form of mushrooms (i.e., the fruiting bodies of some fungi), rhizomorphs (i.e., root-like, nutrient-collecting, fungal fibers that may be found just beneath, or under the bark of, decomposing logs), or lichens (A partnership between a fungi and a photosynthetic microorganism that typically grow on trees or rocks).
One way to start is to go outside and ask each of the children in your care to find a living thing and tell you about it. Ask them to name it and describe what it looks like. Don’t worry about how specific the name is- bug, worm, bird, painted lady butterfly, or V. cardui. Your intermixed and follow-up conversations should start with your child’s observations and potentially build through their description of what they experienced. If necessary, ask them supporting questions as hints. For example, are animals alive? Can you see any animals? Are plants alive? Can you see any plants? For each living creature they see, ask them what they see and hear? For plants and fungi, ask them what they feel like and smell like? Next, ask them about each being’s features: How big is it? What colors are its various parts? Is it moving? Can you move like its moving? If they can handle a crayon, ask them to draw the being they found. Ask them to describe their drawing. What does each part of the drawing represent?
Once each child has found a being encourage them to find one from a different kingdom. If they found an animal, ask them if they can find a plant or fungus. If they found a plant, ask them to find an animal. You may have to help them look for rizomorphs or lichen if there aren’t any mushrooms around. Once your group has identified it’s second organism, you can start asking them about the similarities and differences between each of the beings they found. You can also use any field-guides you have and/or the Internet to see if they can identify each being, with your help as necessary.
One of my favorite extensions for this field trip is doing an index card taxonomy wall. The basic idea is to have kids fill in an index card for any local living thing they find. Each card should include both the latin binomial name for the being above its common name (e.g., D. plexippus/Monarch Butterfly). Adding the Indigenous names and common names from your own communities have for the organsims you find can encourage more resonance with our natural world. I suggest using Wikipedia to find these names. I’ve started local taxonomy walls by creating the top level categories (i.e., the three macroscopic kingdoms) with kids by asking them to name some types of living things. Plants and animals usually come up pretty quickly. I often have to ask, “What about mushrooms?” to get folks thinking about fungi!
With or without this top-level starter, each time a child fills out a card we place it at the bottom of the wall and then connect it up through the taxonomy hierarchy from species, to genus, to family, to order, class, to phylum, to kingdom creating cards for those taxa as necessary. For example, if a child identified a Monarch butterfly they would create a card something like this
Then, they would create any genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom cards necessary to connect this card up to the corresponding card.
I’ve extended this task in two ways. One is to go on and create a local field guide using the species on your wall and other field guides as a starting point. The other is to create Care and Feeding pages for selected beings from your wall. Both of these make excellent long-term projects. Both can be either group or individual projects. When I’ve done local field-guide projects we have started with the organisms on our taxonomy wall, a stack of field guides, and the internet. We use the field guides to survey different decisions that authors have made (e.g., pictures or artist renditions, pictures with descriptor pages or in a separator section) and for data about each species. Care and Feeding pages can be serious descriptions of how to take care of specific plant and fungal species that can be grown domestically or supported in the wild (e.g., planting plants that attract wildlife or putting water out for wildlife). They can also be humorous. I did one on myself once.
Educational Tip
As I mentioned in a previous blog post Why Ecological Education Now?, my educational goal is to support children and their adults loving the natural world and being ecological including:
Being aware of our interdependence with each other and our ecosystem.
Experiencing ourselves as interdependent with each other and our ecosystem.
Understanding how we are interdependent with each other and ecosystems through an integrated traditional/modern perspective.
Acting as if our well-being is inexorably bound up with the well-being of all other beings and our shared ecosystems, because it is.
Knowing how we are interdependent with our local ecosystem requires both an understanding of how ecosystems work and knowledge about the contributors and relationships within one or more ecosystems.
We see a major part of understanding how ecosystems work as understanding the patterns of relationships that characterize them (e.g., mutual relationships, material cycling, and feedback loops) and knowing how those patterns play out in one or more ecosystems given the specific contributors to those ecosystems.
In the Nature Tag - Tree Tag Version post we introduced a fun way to learn tree and other ecosystem contributor names. This field trip expands on learning names to learning kinship relationships. Learning about how all living beings are interrelated helps us become increasingly familiar with other our kin that share an ecosystem and helps us see that we are all related!
While I think that remembering things like names is important I think memorizing has limited utility. With experience and immersion will come the knowing of our neighbors' names and patterns or relationships.
Some Nature Science
If you like, you can work with older children to have them complete a partial taxonomy for the five beings they find. Here’s an example.
Finally, you can ask them to explain what being alive means. How do you know if something is alive? Many kids will start by saying something like things that are alive move. Provide counterexamples. Are cars alive? Are plants alive? Are we alive when we’re sleeping? People go through a development sequence in terms of their conceptions of life. Your goal is here is not necessarily to change their conception, but instead to explore it.
For what it’s worth, biologists struggle to define life. Old-school definitions provide a list of characteristics common to most living things most of the time. For example, individual living beings adapt to changes in their environment by responding to stimuli while populations of living beings adapt to changes in the environment over generations through evolution by natural selection. Individual living beings also maintain homeostasis, are composed of one or more cells with a membrane that separates the inside and outside of the cell(s), metabolize (i.e., use and release energy via chemical processes in cells), reproduce, grow, and change over their lifetimes (individual development) and eventually die. These characteristics can be summarized as, “living beings form relationships with their environments, including each other, to sustain themselves and their environment.
Wrap Up
Classifying things is a very human activity that can get us into all kinds of trouble. It is also what enables us to generalize and use what we know from prior experiences to respond to novel situations. Learning about how all living beings are interrelated helps us become increasingly familiar with other our kin that share an ecosystem and helps us see that we are all related! Observing, describing, representing, classifying, researching, and documenting living beings are all greta ways to get to know our kin!