Living or Non-Living?

We are just beginning our animal inquiry.  One of the first questions that the kids had was how you know if something is alive or not.  What makes a living thing a living thing?

We pretty much knew that plants and animals are living, but we weren't sure what the rules were for how you know if something is alive.

 During reading workshop we read books that had plants and animals and kept a list of how we know if something is living.

We came up with the following list, as we brainstormed ideas.

Next, we used sources such as books, PebbleGo, and Google Classroom to confirm our thinking or to categorize it as a misconception.
If we found evidence of something on our list, we put a check next to it to confirm our thinking.  If we couldn't find evidence of something on our list, we put an X on it to mark it as a misconception.

We came up with this list.  We will be thinking about that as we do further research.

We liked this video from our Google Classroom about living and nonliving.