Family and Friends — relationships, work, animals and plants

What this heading covers

Family and Friends is the first and largest of the six EVS themes, and it is broader than its name suggests: it takes in family and relationships, the work people do, animals, and plants. The EVS paper draws more questions from this theme than from any other.

Two things to hold throughout. The subject is integrated, so a question about a family may be asking about biology, economics or social attitudes. And it starts from the child's own surroundings, so the expected answer is usually the one grounded in ordinary life rather than the textbook definition.

Relationships and the family

Kinds of family:

• Nuclear — parents and their children.
• Joint — more than one generation, or married siblings and their families, living together and usually sharing a kitchen and income.
• Extended — relatives beyond the immediate household living together or very close by.
• Single-parent families, and families in which children are raised by grandparents or other relatives.

The syllabus expects all of these to be treated as families. A question implying only one arrangement is proper is offering a wrong answer.

Relationship terms appear as puzzle questions — "my mother's brother's daughter is my ___" (cousin); paternal and maternal sides; in-laws. Draw a quick family tree rather than reasoning in words, and mark the speaker first.

Family trees and generations are read from the top down, each row a generation.

Changes in families: families grow, shrink, move for work, and change with births, marriages and deaths. Migration for work, and its effect on children left with grandparents, is a standard EVS theme.

Care and sharing — who looks after whom, and how work and money are shared — connect the family to the work section below.

Work and play

Work done at home is the central point: cooking, cleaning, fetching water, washing, caring for children and for the old and sick. Most of it is unpaid and most of it is done by women, and the syllabus asks learners to notice both facts. Work being unpaid is not the same as it being of no value, which is exactly what such questions test.

Work outside the home — farming, teaching, construction, driving, shopkeeping, weaving, fishing, carpentry, tailoring. At this level the useful distinction is:

• Work that mainly uses skill of the hand and body, and work that mainly uses training and study.
• Work that is regular and secure, and work that is daily and uncertain.

The attitude the syllabus insists on: no honest work is beneath respect, and questions that invite a ranking of occupations are testing whether you will take the bait.

Play: traditional and local games, games needing no equipment, games children invent, and play as learning — cooperation, rules, turn-taking, physical skill. The inclusion point matters too: play that excludes girls, or a child with a disability, is a thing to notice and change.

Animals

How animals are grouped

• Habitat: land (terrestrial), water (aquatic), air (aerial), trees (arboreal), and animals that live in both land and water (amphibians).
• Food: herbivores (deer, cow, goat), carnivores (lion, tiger, frog), omnivores (crow, bear, human), scavengers (vulture, hyena, crow) which eat animals already dead, and parasites (lice, ticks) which live on another animal.
• Domestic and wild.

How they feed

The mouthparts decide it, and matching questions are common:

Animal	How it feeds
Housefly	Sponging
Butterfly, honeybee, humming bird	Sucking nectar
Mosquito	Piercing and sucking
Cockroach, grasshopper	Biting and chewing
Snake	Capturing and swallowing whole
Human infant	Suckling

How they move, breathe and are born

• Movement: walking, running, crawling, slithering, hopping, swimming, flying. Fish use fins, birds wings, snakes move by muscles and scales.
• Breathing: lungs in most land animals; gills in fish and in tadpoles; through the skin in the earthworm; through spiracles in insects. Frogs breathe through lungs and skin both, which is why they appear in questions so often.
• Birth: oviparous animals lay eggs (birds, fish, frogs, most reptiles and insects); viviparous animals give birth to young (most mammals). The platypus, a mammal that lays eggs, is the exception questions like.
• Care of young: birds build nests and feed their young; mammals feed on milk; most fish and insects lay many eggs and leave them.

Other things asked

• Homes of animals: nest, burrow, den, stable, sty, hive, web, kennel, pen.
• Sounds: roar, bark, bray, bleat, chirp, buzz, hiss, croak.
• Young ones: calf, kid, cub, puppy, kitten, chick, lamb, foal, tadpole.
• Useful animals: milk, egg, wool, honey, silk, leather, and labour.
• Adaptations: the camel's hump and broad feet for the desert, the polar bear's fur and fat, the migration of birds, the hibernation of some animals in winter.

Plants

How plants are grouped

• Herbs — small, soft, green stems (coriander, spinach, tomato).
• Shrubs — medium, bushy, woody stems branching near the ground (rose, hibiscus, lemon).
• Trees — tall, one thick woody trunk (mango, neem, banyan).
• Climbers need support to climb (money plant, grapevine); creepers spread along the ground (pumpkin, watermelon).

The climber-and-creeper pair is the one most often swapped: a climber climbs with support, a creeper creeps along the ground.

Parts and what they do

Part	Its job
Root	Anchors the plant, absorbs water and minerals; sometimes stores food
Stem	Holds the plant up, carries water and food between roots and leaves
Leaf	Makes food by photosynthesis; loses water by transpiration; exchanges gases through stomata
Flower	The reproductive part
Fruit	Develops from the flower and protects the seeds
Seed	Grows into a new plant

Roots are of two kinds: a tap root (one main root with branches — mustard, mango, carrot) and fibrous roots (a cluster of similar roots — grass, wheat, rice, maize). Broadly, plants with parallel venation in the leaves have fibrous roots, and those with reticulate (net-like) venation have tap roots.

Which part we eat

Part eaten	Examples
Root	Carrot, radish, beetroot, sweet potato
Stem	Potato, ginger, sugarcane, onion
Leaf	Spinach, cabbage, coriander
Flower	Cauliflower, broccoli, clove
Fruit	Mango, tomato, brinjal, cucumber
Seed	Rice, wheat, gram, mustard

The traps are constant: potato is a stem (it has buds — the "eyes"), sweet potato is a root, onion is a bulb (a short stem with fleshy scale leaves), and tomato and brinjal are fruits botanically.

How plants make food and reproduce

• Photosynthesis needs sunlight, chlorophyll, carbon dioxide and water, and produces food and oxygen.
• Transpiration is the loss of water vapour from leaves.
• Germination is a seed sprouting; it needs water, air and a suitable temperature — not sunlight at the start, which is a frequent wrong option.
• Seed dispersal happens by wind (light, winged seeds), water (coconut), animals (hooked seeds, or eaten fruit), and by bursting.
• Pollination is the transfer of pollen, by insects, wind, water or birds.

A question of the kind the paper sets

A teacher asks class IV to find out who does which work in their homes and to bring the answers to class. The main purpose of the activity is to:

The distractors will be about practising writing, keeping children occupied, or learning the names of household tasks.

The purpose is that the children collect data from their own surroundings and then notice the pattern in it — which work is paid and which is not, and who does most of the unpaid work. That is EVS doing the two things it exists to do at once: starting from the child's own life, and turning an observation into a question worth discussing.

Mistakes that cost marks here

• Swapping climbers and creepers.
• Calling potato a root or onion a leaf.
• Saying germination needs sunlight.
• Treating only the nuclear family as a proper family.
• Ranking occupations by respectability — the syllabus asks the opposite.
• Calling a crow only a scavenger; it is also omnivorous.
• Confusing oviparous (lays eggs) with viviparous (gives birth to young).

In one line

This theme takes the things closest to a child — their household, the work done in it, and the animals and plants around them — and treats them as a subject worth studying carefully.

For the classroom

Almost every fact on this page can be met before it is named: a family tree the children draw, a survey of who does what at home, a week of watching a seed germinate in a wet cloth, a handful of real vegetables sorted by the part of the plant they came from. The pedagogy paper will ask why that order matters; this one asks for the fact it arrives at.