This week we have been identifying a range of different animals and discussing which animal group they belong to - amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish or mammals. Can you think of an example of an animal for each group? What are the characteristics of each? For example, we learnt that mammals have fur or hair, breathe using lungs and feed their offspring with milk. We also learnt that birds have feathers, but that they don't all have to fly. We looked at a range of animals and suggested ways in which they were similar, before putting them in the correct group. Some children worked in a group to identify an animal from a photo and then categorising it, whilst others wrote features of each group and suggested some examples using a table format. Some of us read our animal books from the library and thought about which group the animal would be part of. We then discussed the vocabulary 'carnivore', 'herbivore' and 'omnivore' and learnt what each of these words mean. We thought about whether certain animal groups would be carnivores, herbivores and omnivores but we found out that most animal groups were made up of a mixture of them all! 

This week we have been learning about the structure of animals. We recapped our understanding from last week's lesson and then watched a video by Bill Oddie to see how he described the structure of a slow worm. We practised this ourselves using some animal pictures. We then went into the Eco Garden and tried to find animals to allow us to have a close look at their structure. We found lots of insects in there! We then worked in groups and recorded some videos of ourselves discussing the structure of animals.

This week, we have been discussing the offspring of animals and shared the Big Question - 'do animals look like their adults?' 

We thought carefully about this and studied lots of different examples. We also used our knowledge of animal groups to think about whether we could say that all mammals did look like their adults or all amphibians did not. We discussed what we noticed about the animals and how they were similar or different.