Some great case study reflections on the digestive system 🙂 Children used the knowledge they had gained through case study one to write an explanation of what happens during digestion.
Case study reflection in MI
Category : Biology
How do we group animals?
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…
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
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
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?
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?
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?
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
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?
Hook week continues in MI
We are loving our new expedition! Today we moved onto understanding about digestion. First we built a human body in mini crews, discussing what we already know. We then moved onto labelling our organs and placing them on our human body.
We then explored the organs in more detail thinking about their role. We thought about which of the organs belong to our digestive system. We watched a video clip to build further background knowledge. We did lots of discussion around each organ thinking about its role and how it adds to the digestive process. We then demonstrated our learning in a mini crew activity. We used picture cards, word cards and explanation cards to match up all the different organs.
From here it got messy! We put the digestive process into practice using biscuits, a banana, water, orange juice and a pair of tights! We loved taking part in this!
We then started writing up our model of the digestive system and will continue to work on this tomorrow.