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This activity can be used with Middle and High School students.

First have a discussion about characteristics. Start with the people in the room. Have students rise and separate them by age. Then ask them to choose another characteristic for the second division. Do at least a third division. Ask each student to mentally record who is in their final group. Now ask students to choose another characteristic to make the first division. Again have the students move into their new group. Have students agree on the second characteristic, the third characteristic, each time moving into the new group. Ask students if they are still with the same people who composed their final group in the first run. Suggest that the decision to prioritize characteristic affects the outcome of the classification system.

Separate them into lab groups and give each group a bag of mixed buttons. Dry cleaning establishments have lots of extra buttons that they might be willing to off load to a teacher. Divide the buttons into zip lock bags and distribute to the lab groups in your class. Ask the students fo choose a characteristic by which to separate the larger group into two smaller groups. Ask them to divide each of the larger groups into smaller groups choosing a different characteristics with each degree of separation. Ask a member of each group to record the decisions made by the group in the form of a diagram. When the group feels it is done, ask that the group summarize why they made the decisions that drove the diagram. Now, ask the lab group to start over using a different characteristic to make the first division and follow the same steps as with the first run of this activity, again making the diagram and writing the rationale behind the decisions. By the end of this activity, the students will understand that the decisions of what characteristics to use are important. Middle School students are open to a discussion of race as a characteristic. Is race an important characteristic??? Gauge your student culture to determine if this discussion is appropriate.

If the students are of high school age, you can distribute cut outs of living organisms as was done in the Science as Inquiry Summer Institute activity with the Organism Puzzle Pieces.

Susan