Science

In early years, we explore science through our Understand of the World explorations and investigations. For example, in our outdoor area we have lots of wonderful water equipment that allows us to explore how water travels and moves. We also have an amazing Forest School which we visit each week where we explore the natural world looking for bugs and insects, notice the changes in weather and how that affects nature. We have lots of science fun in early years!

Year 1 identifying crisp flavours with their sense of smell, unfamiliar sounds with their ears, looking for details using hand lenses and their eyes, identifying objects in feely bags with their sense of touch and guessing flavours with their eyes closed using their sense of taste!

LO:  1) recognise that a switch opens and closes a circuit and associate this with whether or not a lamp lights in a simple series circuit.

2) construct a simple series electrical circuit, identifying and naming its basic parts, including cells, wires, bulbs, switches.

Year 4 are reading the book ‘Escape from Pompeii’ this half term.

In Science, they set up circuits and made glowing, erupting volcanoes.  Some children were able to add switches to their volcanoes!

LO: Y6 Living things and their habitats. (Using and devising classification keys.)

Year 6 are learning about classifying.  They identified features of Liqourice Allsorts before devising their own branching keys for four or six objects.  Next week they will be using these skills to devise a branching dichotomous key about leaves!

LO: To find patterns in the way that the size of shadows change.

Y3 Children explored their shadow puppets before being given the challenge: “How can you make your shadow larger”?

They discovered that they had to get the light source closer to their object to make their shadow bigger.

We then devised an experiment to measure the size of the shadow as the light source got nearer.

To identify that most living things live in habitats to which they are suited (Pattern seeking enquiry.  Populating a table.  Making a bar chart)

Y2 children were told that Mr Bates had gathered caterpillars from many different habitats!  They were all different colours because they suited their habitats!  Disaster struck though… they all escaped in our school woods!

The children went on the hunt!  When we got back into school, we made a table of how many of each colour we found, and looked for patterns.  We thought about why we found so few brown and green ones! We then put our data into a bar chart.