Term 5 'Survival'
Survival!
In term 5, our topic is all about survival! We'll begin by exploring what it is that all living things need to survive. We will explore ways to classify animals and plants and use key questions to help us identify these groups. We also begin to look at the diets of a variety of animals and carefully examine 'poo' samples to work out which animal did it! Then, we will explore how a range of plants and animals (including humans) change over time. Using the ipads, we will create a stop motion life cycle movie of a chosen animal.
We began our topic by looking and sorting images of things that are alive, were once alive and have never been alive. We had to think carefully about whether an item had been alive before, or not and stick them into the correct column. Some of the objects required discussion around where we thought it should go.
We then learnt about the different types of animals. We found out that there are lots of types of animals including reptiles, mammals, birds, fish, insects and amphibians. Once we had learnt about their characteristics, we had pictures of different animals that we sorted into the correct classification of animal.
Next, we used our knowledge of characteristics of different animals to create our own. We ended up with some very interesting creatures!
Continuing our learning of animals, we learnt about different diets. We found out that carnivores are animals that only eat meat, omnivores are animals that eat both meat and plants and finally, herbivores are animals that only eat plants. We looked at different animals and sorted them using venn diagram.
We had a lot of fun investigating different animals diets by looking at their poo. We were disgusted and excited when Miss Harrison told us that we would be finding out what the animals ate by exploring their ‘poo’. We then had to decide whether it belonged to a carnivore, herbivore or an omnivore through the clues that we found. We had a lot of fun exploring, though we were relieved to find out that we had been tricked and that it wasn’t real!
We then moved onto to learning about humans and plants. We learnt that as humans we have 5 senses and we use these to help us. We know that our senses are sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.
We enjoyed our trip to Wildwood and were lucky enough to see lots of the animals. During our workshop we were able to handle some of the artefacts such as animal bones, to see what they were like and used these to classify the animals.
After our trip, we continued our learning about animals focussing on their life cycles and food chains. We learnt that each food chain will have a predator, prey and a producer. We used this knowledge to sort these animals into the correct order for the chain.
Finally, we learnt about animal and plant life cycles. We then used our knowledge to create short animations of the life cycle of a butterfly.
In the last week of term, we focussed on art and created some animal images in the style of Eric Carle. First, we evaluated his work - looking at and learning the techniques that he used in his illustration. We then planned and created our own works, used some of the techniques learnt.
