We have a massive collection of plastic animals some of which I brought when I was teaching in a Montessori classroom and we were doing classification so they represent a range of major animal groups. I seem to have lost the birds since then. Helena has always liked these and the collection has grown to include extinct, mythical and teeny tiny animals. Just for a laugh today I asked Helena to classify them. I did say to pretend she didn’t know much about the animals. This is the result.

Not Linneaus style, habitat or some such but the texture of the actual object. She made me have three guesses. I found coming up with one outside the realms of my imagination.

Then I had a go…

That’s Helena laughing at my attempt.. and moving the world’s tiniest sea horse out of land animal to my ‘Lives IN water’ (as compared to ‘BY but dependent upon’) pile. There were several others – apparently our snake is a sea snake. She disputed my Pukeko being dependent on water idea and moved it to the ‘Unknown’ pile (not even the ‘Moist’ pile) after berating me with “but all animals need water mum” followed by some very disparaging comments on my stupidity. I should have known better to try some lets see what you know/testy thing. We play ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral’ a lot and she was the one who chose seal and I was the one who thought she’d made a mistake with the large native mammal that didn’t even have four legs…

She does like to classify things though.

This is her current thinking with her rock and button collections. They do change and get regularly played with. The stones even get washed! The computer wouldn’t let me label all the button categories. My favourite is the large textured circle category. I even did a trade…