Is It Alive?

What does it mean to be alive? Is a cactus alive? Is a seed alive? Is the air we breathe alive? What are the necessary characteristics? To hook learners into the question, they are introduced to “glue monsters” (sometimes known as “scooting glue”) and the learners discuss whether the “monsters” are alive or not. Next, learners are given cards with the names of various objects and asked to sort them into categories: alive, once was alive, never alive, and not sure. Finally, learners create a list defining the characteristics of life--a set of characteristics that all living things share. [Activity is publicly available through a web crawler capture on Archive.org.]