Science in Class 2

Science – learning about plants

In Class 2 in the Autumn Term 2019, the children have been learning about plants. The Year 5 and Year 6 children, in their work on ‘plant and animal reproduction’ began by considering sexual reproduction in plants. They looked at different types of flowers and learned the vocabulary that is used to name the parts of a flower, before drawing a storyboard about how insects support the process of pollination and fertilisation. Then, they learned about different types of plant: those that contain flowers with both male and female parts (‘perfect’ flowers), those that contain two different types of flowers on one plant (dioecious plants) and those that have only male flowers or female flowers (monoecious plants). They then invented their own flowers, making models of these! 

Next, the children learned about different types of asexual reproduction in plants, such as taking leaf or stem cuttings or planting roots (eg. planting potatoes). They had a go at planting some stem cuttings of rosemary plants and planting leaf cuttings by cutting through the central veins, before writing instructions about how to propagate in these different ways. 

Meanwhile, the children in Years 3 and 4 have begun investigating the importance of the different parts of a plant. They began by observing, sorting and classifying leaves from different trees. They then went outside to identify the trees from which these leaves had come, before setting up an experiment to test the importance of leaves to a plant. They have done this by taking two fairly identical plants and removing all the leaves from one of the plants to see what will happen…