Animal Safari - Summer Term 1

In the Animal Safari project, the children will learn about incredible animals that live worldwide. They will explore various animal habitats and compare the animals that live there with animals in their locality. They will learn how to care for pets and what all animals need to grow, survive and stay happy and healthy. They will explore animal features and find out how they survive in the wild. They will compare the ways that animals are similar and different.

Our big question this term is: Where do animals live?

Week 6

Our final week of term has been fabulous! We finished our Animal Safari topic by visiting Wolds Wildlife Park, exploring all the different types of animals they have there. This enabled us to apply our knowledge about the animals and we gathered information around the park which helped us to further answer our big question 'Where do animals live?'. We also started our companion project 'Creep, Crawl and Wiggle' this week. We explored minibeasts and their habitats, compared differences and similarities and used our prediction and observational skills to discover which foods minibeasts prefer. We created models of our favourite minibeasts and were able to describe them from their characteristics. 

Week 5

This week we have been finalising our 'Animal Safari' topic. We have been designing our own animals, giving them a name and a habitat for them to live in. We have discussed our big question 'Where do animas live?' and combined this knowledge to help us design our own animals using features from different animals and their habitats that we have learned about. We have been able to answer this question by studying a range of different animals across the world. We know that not all animals have the same habitat and animals need different things to survive. We were able to explain our designed animal, where it lives, what it eats and why. 

Week 4

Our topic learning this week started by being able to create simple instructions to make a robot move. We went on safari to meet some animals by using a map and a safari jeep. We pretended our safari jeep was a robot and we knew we had to create some instructions to enable it to get to the animals we wanted to meet on the map. We worked well to use the picture card prompts to create our instructions using the correct vocabulary but were also able to debug our instructions if they didn't work correctly. We remembered what a map is and then made maps so we could represent places and journeys. We read a story called Handa's Hen and created a map to help Handa find Mondi. We were able to show the different places Handa visited and the animals she saw on our map.

Week 3

We have continued to learn about animals this week and our learning started by exploring different foods. We used our sense of smell to identify which foods were inside each bowl. We discussed what our favourite foods are and where we get our food from, retrieving some of our knowledge from our topic last term. This then helped us to explore which foods animals eat. We learned about herbivores, carnivores and omnivores and used this knowledge to identify which foods certain animals would eat, enabling us to categorise the animals using this knowledge. Our next lesson looked at animals that live in different parts of the world. We learned that some animals live in hot climates and some live in cold climates. We looked at a map and a globe and learned that the middle of the Earth is called the equator and it is the hottest there and as we get further away it gets colder. We looked at different animals and discussed where in the world we think they live and why. We looked on the map of where the different animals live and the kind of climate they live in. 

Week 2

On Monday we learned about who looks after animals. We were able to understand that if animals and pets need help, they normally visit a vet. We were lucky to look at some photographs from Miss Harrison as she had taken her dog Lily to the vet for a check up last week. We looked at the equipment the vets may use when checking the animals, which we also have in our Vet Role Play area in the classroom. We then listened to a story about an animal that helps people. We know that animals such as dogs can be trained to be assistant dogs or guide dogs to help people who need extra support. Our next lesson consisted of grouping animals. We looked at a range of images of different animals and looked at their features to determine whether they were mammals, reptiles or birds. On Wednesday, we looked carefully at some drawings of animals. We learned that a zoologist is a special scientist that studies animals and they would make careful drawings of animals to record what they looked like in the past. We retrieved our knowledge from Term 3 about the past and knew that cameras haven't always been around which is why drawings were made and used. We looked at the different types of lines used in the drawings and created our own animal drawings. 

Week 1 

Our first week of Summer Term 1 has been very exciting! We have been introduced to our new topic 'Animal Safari' by having discussions about our existing knowledge of animals and pets we have at home. We then explored a Wildlife Park website and discovered the animals that are at the park. We thought about questions we would like to be answered about the animals and our aim is to be able to answer these by the end of the term through our topic knowledge and experiences. We went our own safari around the school to explore what animals live in our school grounds and in our surroundings. We were able to learn what habitats are and what different habitats we know of and can discover around us.