The reality of normal people and parents is that a different basic classification is warranted:
- Humans are what they are;
- Animals are what they are;
- Plants and fungi of the kind you can gather in the forest, and anything else that is macro-scale but doesn't run or swim around, are just "plants";
- Bacteria, viruses, fungi of the other kind, archaea and even single-cellular organisms that could have negative impact on you, are all just "bacteria" or "microorganisms" or "pathogens";
- "Plants" breaks down into "trees", "grasses", "bushes", "shrooms", "flowers", and that's about it;
- "Animals" breaks down into "fish", "reptiles", "birds", "mammals";
That covers about all the biology regular people see, to the extent they care about.
Now, if you're teaching people the biological categorization, any one you will pick will be different from the daily experience of an ordinary person. Like, for practical reasons, whales and dolphins are fish (they look like every other fish and swim in water, and you hunt them with ships), and tomato is a vegetable (you don't put it into a fruit salad), and all that looks like grass is grass (despite genetics telling that some grasses are really just very tiny trees, or some trees are genetically just really big grass, etc.).
Point being, if you're going to teach them a biological categorization, that's already distinct from "normie everyday life" categorization, so you may just as well pick one that's current and useful in biology.
(And once again, this is another case of a non-issue that turns into issue only because people are unable to comprehend and teach the distinction between "is" and "can be thought of as"; the fact that categories are invented by people, are not facts of nature; that their only job is to be useful, and you can have many classification systems for the same thing, useful in different contexts.)
- Humans are what they are;
- Animals are what they are;
- Plants and fungi of the kind you can gather in the forest, and anything else that is macro-scale but doesn't run or swim around, are just "plants";
- Bacteria, viruses, fungi of the other kind, archaea and even single-cellular organisms that could have negative impact on you, are all just "bacteria" or "microorganisms" or "pathogens";
- "Plants" breaks down into "trees", "grasses", "bushes", "shrooms", "flowers", and that's about it;
- "Animals" breaks down into "fish", "reptiles", "birds", "mammals";
That covers about all the biology regular people see, to the extent they care about.
Now, if you're teaching people the biological categorization, any one you will pick will be different from the daily experience of an ordinary person. Like, for practical reasons, whales and dolphins are fish (they look like every other fish and swim in water, and you hunt them with ships), and tomato is a vegetable (you don't put it into a fruit salad), and all that looks like grass is grass (despite genetics telling that some grasses are really just very tiny trees, or some trees are genetically just really big grass, etc.).
Point being, if you're going to teach them a biological categorization, that's already distinct from "normie everyday life" categorization, so you may just as well pick one that's current and useful in biology.
(And once again, this is another case of a non-issue that turns into issue only because people are unable to comprehend and teach the distinction between "is" and "can be thought of as"; the fact that categories are invented by people, are not facts of nature; that their only job is to be useful, and you can have many classification systems for the same thing, useful in different contexts.)