Living and Non-Living Things
Two weeks ago, I visited Solebay Primary Academy – one of Paradigm Trust’s primary schools in Tower Hamlets – with some colleagues to see how our primary science curriculum was being used in the classroom.
At Paradigm we are proud of our primary curriculum and how well our teachers teach it. We’ve had several recent Ofsted inspections which found our curriculum overall very strong (Old Ford Primary Academy was graded outstanding this year and Solebay was inspected just a couple of weeks ago – I’ll update with the judgement when the report is released).
The first lesson we walked in on was a year 1 lesson. Within ten seconds I couldn’t answer one of the questions being asked: is an apple living or non-living?
This might be a simple question for you, but I really didn’t know the answer.
Is an apple a living thing or a non-living thing?
Categorising things as living and non-living is appropriate for year one. We want pupils to begin to understand that some objects are alive (typically plants and animals) while others (e.g. a shoe, a rock or a train) are not. This is the first stage of categorising objects into living things and non-living things. Apples are probably not an example we should have started with!
Teaching categorisation is deceptively difficult. I’ve argued against categorisation as a generic skill (if you want to teach children how to categorise animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, letting them categorise buttons isn’t going to help much). Until recently, I didn’t have a theory of teaching classification, but I’ve been reading Christian Moore-Anderson’s excellent Biology Made Real: Ways of Teaching that Inspire Meaning-Making (2023) which applied Variation Theory to high school biology.
Reading Christian’s book gave me the lens to understand why categorisation is so hard, and how we could teach it more effectively. The key is to gradually help children see differences. It’s about discerning.
Variation Theory is a powerful approach to teaching and learning, which is grounded in the idea that the way we perceive and experience phenomena is directly influenced by the variations we discern in our environment.
Teaching Strategies
There are seven commonly used teaching strategies associated with variation theory. I’ve applied them here to living and non-living things.
Contrast: This involves presenting contrasting examples to bring out the features of the subject matter more vividly. For instance, when teaching living and non-living, a teacher would start with straightforward pairs of living and non-living things – e.g. a plant and a rock; a mouse and a shoe; a spider and a cup. The learners would begin to identify the differences between living and non-living things. Only once pupils had mastered the basic concepts should the teacher begin to introduce trickier items (e.g. is a steam train living or non-living? Is an apple living or non-living? Is a virus living or non-living? Some of these questions will take years to answer: living and non-living has a progression model spanning years).
Generalisation: The teacher uses multiple examples of the same concept to help students see the underlying pattern or principle. For example, in teaching about living and non-living things, the teacher could provide examples of diverse living things to show what they have in common.
Separation: This is used to distinguish between different aspects of a concept. For example, when teaching living and non-living things, the teacher might want to separate non-living things into ‘once-were-living things’ (e.g. something made from wood) from ‘never-were-living things’ (e.g. a brick).
Fusion: This strategy involves integrating different aspects of a concept to give a more comprehensive understanding. When teaching about the living and non-living things, the teacher could bring together ideas of nutrition, reproduction and growing.
Alternation: Alternating between different representations of the same concept can help students gain a deeper understanding. In a lesson about living and non-living things, the teacher could alternate between a life-cycle representation of a butterfly, and a real chrysalis emerging (you can buy classroom kits).
Limit Variation: This involves changing one aspect of a problem while keeping others constant. It’s useful for helping students identify the effects of a particular variable. In a lesson on living and non-living things, a pupil might investigate how different seeds germinate – starting with different types of beans, before introducing other types of seed.
Multiple Perspectives: Presenting the same concept from different perspectives can help students develop a more nuanced understanding. In a lesson about living things sensing their environment, a teacher might lead a discussion on how a cat, a bee and a woodlouse sense their environments.
Variation Theory helps us understand how to break down and teach scientific concepts which involve classification all the way from early years to A-level. It helps us see what is difficult and tells us how to teach it.
Reading for Learning 