We referenced the animal family charts and Dr. Curious' notes.
As you already know, our class studied animal families as one of our science units.  In order for students to apply their understanding of animal families in a new setting, we explored a mysterious animal that has many characteristics from different animal families.
Students were introduced to this challenge by a video plea from Dr. Curious (a.k.a. Mr. Musselman of the Burlington Science Center) asking the students to help him figure out what kind of animal it was.
He let us borrow his scientific journal so we could read all about his observations of this mysterious animal and take notes of all the important facts that we wanted to use as evidence. Keep scrolling through the document to find more of the notes!

 Dr. Curious' Challenge:


Here is the link to the full journal we reviewed: The Journal of Dr. Curious

Then, we reviewed everything we knew about the characteristics of the animal families and used our notes to make a decision.
Our illustrations reflected the details that stood out to us in our notes.



 We drew a picture of what we thought the animal looked like, videotaped our persuasive arguments and sent them to Dr. Curious.  Was this animal a bird, a mammal, or an amphibian?  The students wanted to know!

I think because....

What a surprise it was to see Dr. Curious show up in the classroom to review the students’ findings, just like real scientists do!
Dr. Curious was very enthused to hear our theories.



Dr. Curious tricked us!  His creature is a Squird! Happy Halloween!
A squird?! - Dr. Curious tricked us.  He presented a made up animal that was created through taxidermy. Science does not always have a clear-cut answer but you do need to use a scientific approach to solving problems. 
Thank you Dr Curious!  We had fun and hope you were impressed!