Year Six have been very busy observing similarities and differences and using them to classify living things.
We used a branching key to classify some animals from the animal kingdom and quickly learnt that each time we divide up the living things by particular characteristics, the groups become smaller until we end up with the organism being ‘identified’.
Classification keys are very useful because they can:
•provide a scientific name; •show relationships between groups; •help us to identify organisms accurately.
Some of us then went on to apply our skills by classifying butterflies, birds or bees from the UK. It was super tricky to classify bees because they looked so similar!
We have also been looking at living microorganisms such as bacteria which are tiny, single celled organisms. We learnt that British Scientist Edward Jenner (1749-1823) developed the first successful vaccine: the smallpox vaccine. He observed that milkmaids who previously had caught cowpox did not catch smallpox and showed that inoculated vaccinia protected against inoculated variola virus. We discussed how microbes can be useful or bad for us and explored this by finding out about the discovery of penicillin as a helpful microbe.
In the upcoming weeks we will be learning about Carl Linnaeus and investigating the growth of mould produced by fungi.
Year Six have been very busy observing similarities and differences and using them to classify living things.
