GRADE FIVE SCIENCE
Hello Boys and Girls, How was your past week? Did you learn lots of things at school? Did you enjoy doing the activities in last week’s article? Did you do the MRS NERG test? This week we will continue to look at animals.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different animals all over our planet, Earth. Some live in trees, some live on the ground/under the ground, some live in water. Animals can be found everywhere, in every country, in every desert, mountain, swamp, … everywhere.
You have named several animals. You have seen many animals around you. Are they all the same? Do they all eat the same foods, move in the same way, look the same way? How can you group them?
Animals can be grouped in different ways. How many ways can you think of? Write them down. They can be grouped or classified according to: ● their covering ● how they move ● their eating habits ● their body parts ● how they reproduce ● where they live, and so on
Did your list look like the one above? Scientists have grouped animals into classes in order to make it easier to study them. There are many classes of these animals and every animal belongs to one of them. One of the large groupings is animals with and without backbones. Do you know what these kinds of animals are called? (If you do not know, find out.)
Yes, the animals with backbones are called vertebrates and those without are called invertebrates. Let’s look at the animals around and put each of them into one of the groups.
Vertebrates
Invertebrates Animals dog rat ant bird worm housefly rabbit snake mosquito bat Vertebrates
There are many classes of animals, as we already know. We will now look at the vertebrates. List them in your Science scrap book now.
The main classes are mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and amphibians. Let’s first examine Mammals.
Did you know that there are about 4,000 different kinds of mammals? Oh yes, there are. Did you know also that people are mammals? You are a mammal, and so are dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, monkeys, tigers, deer, donkeys, horses, kangaroos and whales. What is similar about these mammals? Mammals: are warm blooded have hair or fur drink milk/suckle their young have backbone Next week, DV, we will look further at these characteristics. Until then goodbye, Boys and Girls.