Friday 15th November

We started this week’s science lesson by refreshing our memories about what the 7 life processes that all living things can do are. This led us to speak about the massive number of living things that there are in the world, ‘How can we split them up into smaller, recognisable groups?’ We took this idea further and realised that living things can be split into plants and animals. Then further as we split animals into vertebrates and invertebrates. Then further as we split vertebrates into five different categories of their own (fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians). 

Even with all of this narrowing down we realised that sometimes scientists have to be even more specific and so the children were introduced to the idea of a branching database (dichotomous key). This is when scientists use yes or no questions to come to a conclusion about the name of something based on its appearance. Our activity today was to practice coming up with these yes or no questions by trying to narrow down and then guess what mini-beast was on our heads!