Copper class have come back with a fantastic attitude towards their learning! It has been great to continue routines from last year and the learning behaviours I have seen are really positive- keep it up Copper!
Our topic for this term is ‘Disease and Development’ and we have dived right in!
In English, we have been researching the ‘Black Death’ and are writing in the style of ‘Horrible Histories’. We have looked at features of the ‘Horrible Histories’ style and identified them, thinking about how we can incorporate this in our own work. It has been so fun to see the children get creative with their ideas and apply their knowledge of the plague. (Their jokes have been funny too!) They have been so engaged in their learning and have retained a lot of new information.
In Science, we have also been expanding our knowledge on viruses and how they are transmitted. We made a list of all the viruses we know and what we have learnt from Covid. We have been drawing out similarities and differences between the plague and Covid, considering whether we have improved how we fight disease. For our topic launch, we conducted an experiment on enveloped viruses and non-enveloped viruses. To illustrate this we covered two aluminium balls in sticky tape and sprinkles, one having an extra layer of butter to act as the lipid membrane envelope. Both were coated in sprinkles which acted as attachment proteins. We saw how the soap broke down the attachment proteins of the enveloped virus, showing that the PH levels in soap are able to break down the attachment proteins and making the virus no longer infectious. This doesn’t work for all viruses though, as we discussed the importance of vaccines.
