I found an old pile of interesting photos in the bottom of my file cabinet the other day. They were given to me years ago by a teacher who spent a lot of time cutting up old magazines and calendars. I’d forgotten about them. They’re interesting pictures and they’re laminated so they can survive rough handling. I’ve never known what to do with them until last week when I had an idea to use them in a science classification activity. Fourth grade science classification is open ended. Learning to differentiate sets, recognize the criteria used to discriminate between the sets, and then assign labels to them is what it’s all about at that age.

I handed a couple dozen photos to 9 groups of 3 students sitting at tables. I told the kids they could sort the pictures in any way they wanted. And when they had their pictures sorted I asked them to label each set with a word that would describe the set. I then had the kids change tables and try to guess the names of the sets they found. Most groups could figure out at least a few of the descriptive words by looking at the photos. They then re-sorted and labeled the photos for the original group to see a different way of grouping them. It was harder, but not impossible for the first group to guess how the second group had reclassified their pictures. We ran out of time. But I intend to do this again because I think the kids will get better at it, and I want to see if that happens.

When we were wrapping up I asked them to recall the words that were used for labels on some of the groups. They said they had groups called black&white, colorful, mammals, backgrounds, reptiles, landscapes, ponds, plants, sand, nature, fog, cold-blooded and two-of-a-thing. Immediately, I thought this sounded exactly like Flickr groups, which are really just public tags for which group members have to negotiate meaning. I hadn’t expected my students to be so inventive.

Seemed like it might make a good party game.