🦠 Investigating Microbes in Our Classroom

Today, we became scientists investigating microbes! In our science lesson, we explored our classroom to find out which areas might be the “dirtiest” and where we could find the greatest number of bacteria.

We began by learning about good and harmful bacteria, including where bacteria can be found and how they can travel from one place to another. We then carefully collected samples from different areas around the classroom, thinking carefully about how to make sure our investigation was a fair test.

Our samples were placed onto agar jelly, which provides the ideal conditions for microbes to grow because it contains the nutrients and moisture they need. 🧫

Now comes the exciting part… we have to wait! Over the next few days, we should begin to see different cultures growing on our agar plates. We will then be able to observe and compare our results to see which areas of our classroom contained the most microbes.

We can’t wait to see what our investigation reveals! 🔬🦠

Today, Year 6 continued their learning about classification by putting their classification key skills to the test!

We began with a rather tasty-looking challenge: Dolly Mixtures! 🍬 The children carefully observed the different characteristics of the sweets, considering features such as shape, colour and layers, before using these differences to create and follow classification keys.

We then transferred these skills to the natural world, examining a variety of leaves. 🍃 The children looked closely at features including shape, edges, veins and structure to identify similarities and differences and classify them accurately.

This practical lesson built on our previous learning about invertebrates and vertebrates and the different groups within the animal kingdom. We are now extending our classification knowledge further as we explore plants and microorganisms, thinking about how scientists use observable characteristics to organise and identify living things.

A brilliant day of observing, questioning, comparing and classifying! 🔍🌱

As part of our learning about living things and their habitats, the children recapped their previous knowledge of vertebrates and invertebrates, remembering that vertebrates have a backbone while invertebrates do not.

We then revisited the five main groups of vertebrates: mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. The children discussed the key characteristics of each group before completing a hands-on classification activity. Working together, they examined different animals, considered their features and sorted them into the correct groups.

There was lots of brilliant scientific discussion as the children explained their choices and used key vocabulary to justify how they had classified each animal.

A fantastic recap of previous learning and a great start to our Year 6 classification work! 🐸🐍🐟🦅🐯