In preparation for our visit from Ian at 'Crazy Creatures', we thought about what we had learnt about animals in Year 1 and Year 2.  We remembered words like..

• Mammals
• Reptiles
• Fish
• Birds
• Amphibians

We tried to think of examples of each any also tried to come up with some features of each group.  We remembered the words, carnivore, herbivore and omnivore ​​​​​​​and what they meant.  It was surprising to describe a penguin as a carnivore!

Working in pairs, we came up with our own criteria to sort animals, using our knowledge of classification.

We also started to think about different sorts of skeletons.  We looked closely at the human skeleton during our art work (Leonardo de Vinci) and made some careful observational drawings.

We also learnt about the different sorts of skeletons creatures might have.

Some animals, including humans, have skeletons on the inside (Endoskeletons) and others like the cockroach Ian showed us, have skeletons on the outside (Exoskeletons).

We have. Even looking closely at pictures of skeletons from different animals.  We noticed things they had that were the SAME and things that were DIFFERENT.

We thought about the statement.. How to skeletons protect our bodies ..and realised that the skull and rib cage are very important.

So that we are ready for our next enquiry, we examined a new piece of equipment; the force meter.  We compared the different coloured force meters to see what we noticed.  We also thought about how to use them safely.

We looked at he skeletons of a flamingo and a rhino.  We noticed that the bones of a rhino were much thicker and bigger.  We posed the question....Are bigger bones stronger?

We set up 2 different enquires...

Are longer bones stronger and Are thicker bones stronger?

We made different ‘ bones ‘ to help us with our enquiry.