Author Archives: Sophie Dale

What a fantastic afternoon we had looking at signs of Autumn. Our first of four trips to the park allowing us to identify and explore the different seasons and their unique characteristics. We know that each season lasts around 3 months with Autumn starting in September and finishing at the end of November. 

To start our walk we used our Autumn checklist and explored the area looking for items such as conkers, leaves and pine cones. Here are some of the items we found:

During our time at the park. We were brilliant scientists and thought about some interesting questions such as ‘Do trees with bigger leaves lose their leaves first in Autumn?’ and we also did comparative tests such as ‘Which trees have the biggest leaves?’.

One of our favourite activities of the trip was doing an observational sketch of a tree. On our next visit for our Winter trip we will sketch the tree again allowing us to observe the changes overtime.

In science this week we re-capped our understanding of the human body and focussed on the enquiry ‘are animal’s bodies the same as ours?’. To start off our lesson we looked at a variety of photographs of different animals. I asked the children to identify their different features and characteristics.

After that we created two groups. One group of features we share with animals and one that we don’t. Here are some of the similarities and differences.

             Similarities                                                                             Differences

Eyes, mouth, head, legs and ears.                                    Tusks, trunks, hooves, fur, scales                                                                                                 and fins.

We had some great discussions about animal body parts and why they might have certain characteristics. We can’t wait to learn more about this next week!

In science we have been looking at the human body. We could identify our different body parts and understand why they are important. This week, we looked at and explored our 5 senses. We started with touch. We passed round the circle a soft teddy bear, sand paper, cotton wool and playdough. The children described the objects as: “rough”, “sticky”, “fluffy” and “scratchy”. We now understand that we don’t just use our hands and fingers to touch as we can feel things with many parts of our bodies.

We then explored our sense of smell. We smelt garlic, rosemary, lavender and coffee. We agreed that they smelt very different. Some were strong and some smelt sweet!

We then explored our taste buds! We discussed how everyone has different taste buds which means we all do not like the same things. We then did a comparative test with the question does our sense of taste get stronger when we close our eyes? The majority of the children agreed it did! We used salt and sugar which we all agreed were very different. Their favourite was the sugar!

We finally explored our sense of sight and hearing by playing different sounds and identifying what was making that noise. We then turned our classroom lights on and off, exploring seeing in the light and dark! Overall, we had a lot of fun exploring our 5 senses!