Humanities: Make an Animal Chart

For Humanities, we've been studying Ancient Egyptian Animals. Now we're going to do a project:

Let's make a poster about ancient Egyptian Animals. We're going to sort out all the animals on this list: http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddssdqrh_76ch8gssg9 (you can find information about most of them on this site: http://learninglynx.blogspot.com/2010/01/ancient-egyptian-bestiary.html). Feel free to print the list--you can even cut the list up and glue the words onto your poster if you don't like to hand-write things.

There are many ways you can sort them. For example, you could organize them by what they eat (carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores), or by what kind of animal they are (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish), or by what color they are, or what size they are, or any number of other ways.  What we're going to do today is make a poster to hang on the wall that organizes by how they interacted with the humans in Ancient Egypt. For example, were any of the animals used for food? For pets? Were any of the animals dangerous to people? Which were related to the Egyptian gods? Some animals will fit into more than one category. You can brainstorm categories now (for food; for protection; danger; pets; gods are just some of the choices you might use), but keep in mind that you might need to add new categories as you go.

To make a poster of this, we need a visual way of organizing the information. Look at these samples of different ways of organizing information graphically, choose which you are going to use, and make a poster or book.

http://www.swiftchart.com/example_3.htm#tree_ex5

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/stapleless-book-30010.html

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/readwritethink-webbing-tool-30038.html

http://my.hrw.com/nsmedia/intgos/html/igo.htm

http://www.educationoasis.com/curriculum/graphic_organizers.htm

http://www.graphic.org/squirrel.html

http://www.graphic.org/class.html

http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/cluster.pdf

http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/ideawheel.pdf

http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/spider.pdf

http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/tree.pdf

http://www.graphic.org/concept.html

I'm not promoting this software, since it's not free and I've never used it. But their website has some good visual examples of graphic organization that you can use as starting points to just draw your own:

http://web.singnet.com.sg/~axon2000/showcase.htm. Click on each thumbnail to enlarge it.

(For more Graphic Organizer tools and printables, check out the "Online Tools" section of the index. With some of these tools, you can even make your poster online and then print it.)

If you have a printer, you can print pictures of the animals to glue onto your poster. You could also just write the names, or draw pictures. If you want, you can use color-coding to add another layer of organization to your chart. For example, you could write the names of all carnivores in red, all omnivores in blue, and all herbivores in green, regardless of what other category they fit into on your poster. Be creative!

Feel free to decorate the poster any way you want. We'll add it to the wall with our maps of Egypt when you are done.