Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Our curriculum in action

Year 3 - Food and our Bodies

Our Y3 super scientists had fun sorting food packaging to learn all about the different food groups – fruit and vegetables, carbohydrates, proteins, fats and dairy. They learned what herbivores, carnivores and omnivores are and used their maths skills to sort different animals into these groups.

Learning about the skeleton came next where they worked in groups to complete a big skeleton jigsaw and learn the scientific name for lots of the bones. Do you know where your cranium is? Lots of bones have special functions and the children explored this, while also learning that not every living creature has a skeleton on the inside of the body – an endoskeleton. Did you know that some creatures have an exoskeleton and some have a hydrostatic one? Finally Y3 made models to show how muscles and bones work together to help our bodies move.

Pupil Voice:

What did you like about this topic? “I liked leaning about all of the food groups. There was fruit, vegetables, protein, carbohydrate, and dairy.”

Year 3 – Forces and Magnets

Children learned that a force is a push or pull that causes a change in speed, direction or shape. They had lots of fun designing an investigation to test how far a toy car will travel on different surfaces. They worked together to think about all the variables and made sure that their tests were fair. Children measured their results with strips of coloured paper and then transformed this into a graph.

Children then explored magnets where they investigated which materials were magnetic and found out that not everything that is made from metal is attracted to a magnet. Finally, they used very careful measuring to investigate whether magnets can attract objects at a distance and which type of magnet was the strongest.

Pupil Voice:

What did you learn about magnets? “I loved the magnet experiments. Some metals are not attracted to magnets – that surprised me.”

How did you investigate friction? “I liked putting the cars on different surfaces and finding out about friction. The car went the furthest on plastic because it was smooth so it didn’t have much friction.”

Year 4 - Teeth and Digestion

Children had great fun building a model digestive system and getting messy to show the journey that food takes through our bodies. They learned the different parts of the digestion system and the special functions they have. Learning then focused on teeth – the different names of teeth, their special jobs and most importantly how to look after our teeth. Children set up an investigation to test whether different drinks affect our teeth in different ways. Don’t worry – we didn’t use actual teeth but instead used egg shells because, like our teeth, they have enamel. They found out that water caused no damage to the “teeth” but fizzy sugary pop and fruit juices attacked the enamel and ruined the “teeth”! Finally, the Y4 scientists learned all about food chains and explored how a small change to our environment can have a big impact on wildlife.

Pupil Voice:

What do you like about science? “If you want to be a scientist when you grow up you get to learn everything at our school so when you grow up you can be a scientist.”

Year 4 – Sound

Our Y4 scientists’ next topic was sound, where they learned that sound is caused by vibrations which travel in waves. They learned lots of new vocabulary while exploring how we hear – did you know that inside your ear there is a hammer, anvil and stirrup? Next, they investigated pitch and had lots of fun exploring the sound made by different sized boom whackers. They even made their own set of pan pipes to show all they had learned. Finally, they looked for patterns in a set of results all about the volume of sound and even learned what an anomalous result was – a result that doesn’t seem to follow the pattern. Like all good scientists their advice was to carry out lots more tests.

Pupil Voice:

“We used straws to make a pan pipe. The longer tubes made a lower tone because the sound waves have further to go and the sound waves travel faster through the small one so it is a high pitch.”

“Science is one of my favourite lessons because you get to do different experiments. Making pan pipes was lots of fun.”

“I really enjoyed learning about how the ear works – it is so much fun. I loved making the pan pipes. We learned all about pitch. Pitch is how high or low a sound is.”

Year 5 - Earth and Space

Our Y5 scientists learned that over time there have been two models of the solar system – the geocentric model and the heliocentric model. They found out that before Nicolaus Copernicus came up with the hypothesis that the sun was at the centre of the solar system (heliocentric), many people believed that our planet was at the centre because they could see that it looked like the sun was moving across the sky. Next, the children learned all about the planets in our solar system, how we measure a year and how we get day and night. Did you know that a day on Venus is longer than a year! It takes Venus longer to rotate once on its axis (a day) than to complete one orbit of the Sun (a year). That's 243 Earth days in one day on Venus and only 225 Earth days in a year on Venus.

Children used their knowledge of day and night to investigate time zones and then went onto understanding more about the moon.  

They also experienced a mobile planetarium visit in school to enrich their learning further. 

Pupil Voice:

What do you like about science? “I like it because science is full of facts and it is really interesting.”

Year 5 - Forces

This topic built on the work done in Y3. Children used their knowledge of forces to draw force diagrams and investigated these by moving Maltesers around the class in different ways. The work was linked to their topic on Earth and Space and children investigated which brake pads would be “the best” for the Mars Rover and what size of parachute would be “best” to land the robot safely on the planet. Our Y5 scientists were able to plan more independently by considering all of the variables and look for patterns in results in order to draw their own conclusions.

Pupil Voice: 

What do you like about science? “I like all of the experiments. We always have something interesting or unusual to do like the Malteser experiment. We were learning about forces with our Maltesers. We learned about blowing forces, gravity and friction. Friction works in the opposite direction to the way you want the malteser to go.”

Year 6 - The human circulatory system

In the autumn term, Y6 had an in depth look at the human circulatory system. They found out how the heart and lungs work together along with arteries, veins and capillaries to provide the body with oxygen. It was lots of fun to go onto the yard and pretend to be oxygenated and deoxygenated blood on its journey around the body. Next, our Y6 scientists were able to consider all of the variables in order to plan an investigation to see if they agreed with another scientist’s hypothesis – Tom says, “Your heart rate increases when you are running because you are moving. It will not go up when you are doing the plank because you are still.” The children then built on their Y3 work on food groups and provided detailed advice to help some characters improve their health with improved diet and exercise. Finally, Y6 focused on drugs. They learned about the positive and negative effects they can have on our bodies and children used their maths skills to analyse data.

Year 6 - Electricity

Children had lots of fun in their topic on electricity. They were able to use the correct vocabulary and symbols for parts of a circuit and used these to draw their own circuit diagrams. Y6 especially enjoyed being electricians and using their scientific problem solving skills to find and fix the faults in a variety of circuits. They learned what voltage is and how this affects the components in a circuit. They then used this to create series and parallel circuits and understood why at Christmas time lots of people can’t get their fairy lights to work.

Pupil Voice:

“I like doing experiments. I am enjoying being an electrician and finding faults in the circuits”

In this section

Curriculum

Curriculum Content