Explore

Spring Term

 

Explore

 

During the Spring term, Year Six focused on a geography-based Explore project. Throughout the term we explored our big question:

 

 Is home where the heart is?

 

To be able to answer our big question we first had to think what home means to us. We discussed different scenarios and thought about what we need from a home in order to thrive as a specie. Following on from that, we looked at different species that live alongside us on our planet, Earth.  We linked our learning back to the previous term where we learnt about evolution and what animals need to survive. This raised questions around global warming and climate change, we had to explore this more!  We looked at the impact of: deforestation, ice caps melting and the planet warming up. We followed this up with David Attenborough’s documentary to see how different areas of the world are changing because of our actions and how the different species are in danger of extinction.

 

To develop our learning further, we has a visitor from the Sherwood Forest Trust. Ian Major helped us see how our local area had changed over years and deforestation had occurred closer to home than we first thought. The local area changed because of humans and how we wanted to live! This made us feel partly responsible and we had to do something to help our local area. We decided to help the Sherwood Forest Trust plant trees at Portland College. This is a skill we can now use in the future!

 

To ensure we could use the right technical vocabulary we looked at the different continents, oceans and, human and physical geography features. We looked at the impact of volcanoes and earthquakes had on people and environments.

 

To make our topic cross-curricular, we linked to Science project – Animals including Humans. This helped us understand more about our circulatory system and how we can keep healthy. A teacher from Samworth Community Academy came to show us how to dissect a heart and showed us in detail how the different parts of the heart work together.

 

Due to school closing earlier than we planned, we didn't get to finish our project - but we would have gone onto looking at different areas around the world such as Bolivia in Spain and compare it to an area within the UK. The children were also going to complete a piece of work about the Amazon and why we need to protect it for future generations.