This term in Year 6 we are thoroughly enjoying our Climate Cops theme. We have begun by investigating how the Earth and all living things came into being, with a focus on evolution and adaptation. The children have been busy learning about the work of famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who came up with the system of classification which we still use today. Did you know there are five main kingdoms into which all living things are classified? Animalia, Monera, Plantae, Protoctista and Fungi.

We are currently exploring the animalia kingdom in more detail and have been classifying lots of different invertebrates. To help us with this we took a trip up to Forest School and tried to see how many different invertebrates we could find. Between the two classes we saw wasps, hornets, stag beetles, ladybirds, worms, spiders, woodlice, caterpillars and even a devil’s coach horse beetle! The children then applied their knowledge of these creatures to help them create appropriate natural habitats for them – we are going to have some very happy minibeasts up at Forest School!

Back in the classroom we learned how to classify everything we saw into further groups by exploring some of the different orders within the arthropod phylum (group), including gastropods (e.g. snails), annelids (e.g. worms) and insects. Then we discovered that insects can be divided into even more groups, which all have tricky names to remember such as lepidoptera, which includes moths and butterflies. We made some careful observations of all these different creatures and produced some lovely scientific drawings of them, some of which you can see in the slideshow below.