Growth and Survival (Animals Including Humans)

What will we learn?

We will learn about what animals, including humans, need in order to grow, thrive and survive. We will explore the life cycles of various animals and investigate how young develop into adults, looking specifically at what humans need to live a healthy life.

To begin with we discussed why we thought it was important for animals (including humans) to have babies and thought about what would happen if they didn't.  We realised that animals have babies so that their species survives and if they didn't they would become extinct.  We compared baby animals to their parents and noticed that some babies do not look anything like their parents.  We also discovered that baby animals have different names to adult animals.  Our activity, was to match up a variety of adult animals to their offspring and have a go at naming them.

 We learnt that not all animals have babies in the same way.  We now know that some animals, including humans, grow their babies in their tummies and give birth to live young.  We also know that other animals lay eggs so their babies can grow outside of the animal's body.  Using what we learnt, we had to sort animals into animals that give birth to live young and animals that lay eggs.   We used information sheets and books to help us.  We then explored the life cycles of various animals and drew the lifecycle of a cat and a chicken.

 We explored how humans grow as they get older.  We discussed the vocabulary oldest and youngest and looked at the stages that we go through as we grow from a baby into an adult.  

We found out what animals, including humans, need to survive.  We discovered that although animals are very different from each other, they all need the same things to survive - food, water and air.

Animals live in lots of different habitats and their bodies have adapted to suit the environment they live in.  We learnt about ways in which habitats provide some things that animals need and how animals are best suited to specific environments.

We used different sources to find the information we were looking for.

We have being finding out how to eat a healthy and balanced diet.  We know that we eat food because we need it to stay alive. We learnt that food gives our bodies the energy it needs to move and to grow and without food, we would not be able to walk, run, talk or even breathe. We also learnt that foods contain vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that keep our bodies working properly.  Different types of foods are useful to our bodies for different things so it is important to eat a balance of various foods. We also need to make sure that we eat the right kinds of foods to keep us healthy.

Our task was to plan a day's meals, making sure that each meal is good for us.