As I prepared my lessons on the 6 characteristic of life, I was despairing at how boring the whole unit was. So I did some digging online and found the perfect (and fun) application. My kids loved it and they definitely deepened their understanding in ways they wouldn't have without this project. "My Living Invention" has students inventing their own creature and defending how their creature has each of the 6 characteristics of life.
The beauty of the project is that it takes very little time. I had 6 lessons, one for each of the characteristics. At the end of each lesson, students filled out just the box pertaining to that characteristic, which took all of 10 minutes. Then, at the end of the unit, we threw everything together onto a poster board. Students were super invested and very avidly paying attention to the lessons in order to better defend their creature. They loved it!
Here are all of my student's finished projects on the wall.
As you can see, students were super creative. We had many flighted animals, some animal-combos, and some more unique creatures such as flesh-eating plants.
Here is a close-up of one of the posters.
One thing I absolutely loved about this project is how deeply students had to think about the concepts. Creation is the highest order of Bloom's taxonomy, and students really had to understand each concept in order to defend their creature well. It also made assessment really really easy. It was so easy to see any misconceptions students held, based on what they wrote, and I was able to correct some of their thinking after grading these projects. The difference between adapts and responds was by far the most difficult for my students.
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