Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism. Plants and animals have unique and diverse life cycles.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Humans use natural resources for everything they do.

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals. Plants need water and light to live and grow.

Plants depend on water and light to grow.

Adult plants and animals can have young. In many kinds of animals, parents and the offspring themselves engage in behaviors that help the offspring to survive.

Benchmark Standards:
5C/P2 

By the end of second grade, students should know that: Most living things need water, food, and air.

By the end of second grade, students should know that: Plants and animals both need to take in water, and animals need to take in food. In addition, plants need light.

By the end of second grade, students should know that: To grow well, plants need enough warmth, light, and water. Crops must be protected from weeds and pests.

Analysis:
This task relates to metacognition due to its focus on the students reflecting on their own answers and way of thinking. They are thinking about how and why they classified each living or non-living thing and whether they meet the requirements for each category. In addition, applying these reflection questions to their previous thinking allows them to make connections between similarities and differences between the two categories. This process can be described as self- explanation because the student is explaining and reflecting on why they chose the process or answer. How People Learn 2 states that " Self-explanation is a strategy in which learners produce explanations of material or of their thought processes while they are reading, answering questions, or solving problems..." (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). This helps students understand the content and help students analyze how they think and strategies they can use when using classification skills. 

As students explore the examples, they may discover other characteristics of life they hadn't thought of earlier. Encourage them to add these characteristics to the chart."

Analysis:
Using scientific inquiry skills to apply to classifying living and nonliving things uses both lower and higher order thinking portrayed in Blooms Taxonomy. The students must use prior information in order to complete this activity, the article  Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally states that, "You can not understand a concept if you do not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts if you do not understand them. It is a continuum from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills" (Churches, 2008). 
In order to establish the difference between living and nonliving, the student needs to use the skill "remembering" to be able to identify the characteristics of the two components talked about previously in class. Then they would use the level of "understanding" in order to process the information and be able to classify them into the two groups. Next would be "analyzing" because the students would be comparing similarities and carefully observing the object to make a decision. Last would be creating because students are encouraged to create and incorporate their own characteristic into the list that were not talked about in class.