Bob Valiant, 15 March 2004
Thinking Skill Emphasized: CLASSIFY/CATEGORIZE
By grouping similar things together we are able to organize vast amounts of information into manageable chunks.
Life presents each of us with tens-of-thousands of occurrences where we interact with objects, events, and other people. Our brains would have a difficult time keeping track of this jumble if we did not have the capacity to group items together into categories. For example, there are many kinds of plants that can be organized into smaller groups such as monocots and dicots and further grouped as evergreen and deciduous. By grouping similar things together we are able to organize vast amounts of information into manageable chunks.
For each of the sets of items listed below, classify the items by placing them in groups with similar properties, then give each group a name or category:
1. apple, scissors, pencil, cheese, book, brick, corn, tree
2. hammer, photograph, door, cork, rock, book, iceberg, coin
3. heat, butterfly, sound, rabbit, ant, cow, light, beetle
4. fat, glacier, ice, steam, battery, fog, generator, protein
5. koala, sulphur, photosynthesis, iron, wombat, digestion, kangaroo, oxygen
Grade Level Range: Secondary
Subject or Course: Any