Hook Week – Biology

27th August 2025Laura Hamill

During this lesson, Crew Rankin began looking at animal classification. We began by taking part in a Kahoot quiz to test the knowledge we already had, seeing what we could already answer about the different classifications. Following this, we spent some time taking part in a carousel activity in which we read brief fact sheets about each animal group and answered comprehension style questions about what we had read. Once we had built up our knowledge on each group, we then worked in mini crews to create a class set of google slides that detailed as much information about our given classification as we could. You can see our work following the QR code.

How do we group animals?

28th January 2025Ruth Shields

In our expedition lesson (science), we have been learning about grouping animals. We learned (through some reading) that the scientific word for this is taxonomy and that the reason we do this is because we like things to be organised and orderly.

We discussed some ways that animals could be grouped and looked at some examples. Children then had an opportunity to group some animals using a Venn diagram. After this, they were given a larger group of animals where they worked in pairs to decide how they could be grouped. Children were able to show a good understanding of how they could be grouped differently and it was great to see them using language such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammals, warm blooded or cold blooded. We’re now ready to move on to classification.

Expeditionary learning continues in MI…

22nd January 2025Stacey McClare

Our expedition lesson today continued to look at grouping living things. First, we recapped our previous learning on vertebrates and invertebrates, working with our partner to sort a variety of animals.

From here we started to classify vertebrates into 5 groups and watched a video clip to help us build background knowledge. We noted down facts and then shared these with the whole crew. We then explored a variety of texts, building further information on mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. We played fastest finger to further assess our understanding. There were lots of reading opportunities again today, reading with a partner and echo read to name a few.

From here we worked in mini crews to demonstrate our understanding. We read a variety of facts and put these facts in the correct group.

We then took part in a quiz to test our understanding further! We are really enjoying our expeditionary lessons 🙂

Grouping animals in MI

20th January 2025Stacey McClare

Our expeditionary learning today allowed us to recognise that living things can be grouped in a variety of different ways. First of all we looked at a variety of objects and thought about how we may group them. We worked well in mini crews to do this. We then moved onto looking at similarities and differences between certain living things and animals. We thought back to our previous lessons on food chains and skeletons to help us with this task. We then moved onto sorting animals into groups using similarities and differences to help us. We thought more about how animals can be grouped including through habitat, physical features and through diet. We discussed the term classify in more detail and related this to ‘taxonomy’. Again, there were lots of reading opportunities where we used fastest finger first to find answers. From here we worked in mini crews to find as many different ways as we could to sort a variety of animal pictures. There was some great collaborative working which was fantastic to see. Our debrief then allowed us to share our groups with the whole crew.

Skeletons and muscles in MI

15th January 2025Stacey McClare

The activate to our expedition lesson today allowed us to recap the human body by making a skeleton. We did this in hook week and it was incredible to see how much quicker we had got today and how much we had remembered!

From here we discussed the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates where we did lots of reading out loud. We played fastest finger first and did lots of discussion! Some of the facts really surprised us when reading. We then explored the types of skeletons linking these to vertebrates and invertebrates. We did some partner reading, echo reading and also some independent reading. We then tested our understanding so far with a quick quiz! We all enjoyed this.

From here we worked in mini crews to sort animals into the two groupings- vertebrates and invertebrates. We discussed our ideas and explained our reasons. We then moved onto the human skeleton, we looked at scientific names for our bones, explored how many bones an adult human skeleton has and looked at what a skeleton does. We linked our skeleton to the digestive process, thinking about the organs that are protected by our bones. From here we discussed our muscles, we even had a go at contracting and relaxing our biceps and triceps! Tomorrow we will assess our understanding with a kahoot quiz!

Digestion – How does it work?

13th January 2025Ruth Shields

After learning about the organs involved with digesting out food, we learned about how each organ plays a vital role in the digestion of food. We discovered the journey that food takes and what happens to it in each stage. To help with this we were able to complete an experiment which shows what happens to food. This did get a little messy but we had fun and really helped our understanding.

Where do the bones and organs go?

13th January 2025Ruth Shields

Before learning about the digestive system, we built a human. Children worked together to cut out the bones and organs before deciding where they thought they should go. We were pretty good at deciding where the bones should go but needed a little support with the organs. We then narrowed it down to the organs that are involved with digesting our food.

How do different liquids effect our teeth?

13th January 2025Ruth Shields

To help us understand the effects of different liquids on our teeth, we conducted an experiment. We used an egg shell which is similar to the enamel of our teeth and placed it into 5 different liquids – coke, orange juice, dilute, coffee and water. We predicted which liquid would cause the most damage. The majority of the crew thought this was coke, however, we were in for a surprise.

After a week, we observed the changes to the egg. Surprisingly, the egg with the most damage was the one in pure orange. This caused a thin layer to peel off and left the surface mottled and rough. Although, fruit is good for us we need to ensure we brush our teeth because the natural sugar in fruit can damage our teeth.

Names of our teeth

13th January 2025Ruth Shields

Last week we started hook week off by learning about teeth. We learned about the different teeth that we have to help us eat. We learned the function (job) of the teeth and the location of each type of teeth. We read a text together about teeth which helped us gain further knowledge about teeth. Did you know that humans have 2 sets of teeth in their lifetime? Did you know that not everyone gets wisdom teeth?