Category : Geography

As Geographers, the Y5 students have been learning about how rivers are formed. They’ve explored UK rivers and world famous rivers but with us living in a city that is shaped by two rivers, The River Hull and The River Humber, we wanted to take our learning outside of the classroom to find out more.

We challenged our Y5 Geographers to identify how land is used beside the river at various points and how the function of the river changes as a result.

Our first stop was at the mouth of the RIver Hull!

We identified land use, talked about the changes in the area and the promotion of tourism. We created excellent sketch maps, working with our partner to label and identify significant human and physical features. We looked at flooding defence and the importance of the huge tidal barrier that can be seen near The Deep.

 

 

For the second part of the visit, we headed inland as we followed the course of the River Hull all the way to the outskirts of Driffield. Here we visited the Yorkshire Water Nature Reserve, Tophill Low. We learned about reservoirs, drains and fish gates here as well as rivers from our very knowledgable guide Richard. We asked fantastic questions as Richard helped us to complete our fieldwork tasks. This was such a contrasting setting to the urban mouth of the river, a tranquil rural beauty spot where tourism was also encouraged to help fund flood prevention in our area.

 

 

Richard told us that the enormous reservoirs at Tophill hold enough water to supply Hull for 90 days!

Being knee deep in the grasses, there was lots of talk about snakes! Richard showed us the skins of the snakes that live in the area but told us not to worry, as soon as they heard our footsteps (and voices) they would have scarpered and were not at all venomous!

 

Needless to say, after getting all of those ‘steps in’, we were shattered on the way back!

Year 3 are really enjoying our new topic about about volcanoes.

We have spent time looking at the layers of the Earth and found out lots of details about each layer. We know the outside of the Earth is called the crust and then the following layers are the mantle, the outer core and finally, the inner core.

We have also looked at the parts of a volcano and can identify different parts such as the crater, the throat, the vent and the ash cloud.

This week, we have looked at different types of volcanoes. We looked at different volcanoes around the world and discussed why we thought they may be different form each other. We thought that some may be dormant or extinct volcanoes as trees and plants were growing around them. We also thought that some volcanoes were older than others.

The volcanoes we looked at were different forms of volcanoes. We discovered that high sided volcanoes are called composite and that volcanoes that look a little like a bowl and have runny lava are called shield volcanoes.