Year 6 Evolution and Inheritance workshop

Take a journey through the Evolution of humans and other animals via Charles Darwin, Mary Anning and a wide range of rare fossils in our fascinating Evolution and Inheritance workshop, delivered straight to the comfort of your school and covering all of the topic objectives for the year 6 unit.

This is taught with many wow moments (as per all our workshops) such as rare fossil handling, looking at fossils close up on the big screen microscope, and a fossil sorting task, where pupils get to practice the skills used by fossil hunters such as Mary Anning.

In addition, and quite unlike any other science workshop you may have had, we enable pupils to make a real connection between the evolution of the human skeleton by not only meeting and learning about our friendly skeleton, 'Stanley', but also taking several detailed joint models in to a PE 'stations' session to study how different bones have developed to suit different purposes.

Activities in this workshop
(This can be for one class, several classes in turn, or choose one activity as part of a multi science day with other classes)

1) Evolution presentation
The first part of the workshop is a fully detailed interactive presentation that covers ALL of the curriculum content.

Starting with a pupil-friendly explanation of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution and moving on to the impact of Mary Anning's key fossil discoveries and finally on to human evolution the presentation is a fun experience that is very memorable.

Curiously several teachers have told us that it is also the activity that is the most quoted as many pupils' 'best experience' of learning in year six when they compile their assemblies at the end of the year!

2) Viewing rare 'Wow' fossils on a giant microscope!
One of the best parts of this workshop is when the pupils get to see our rare fossils on our large screen microscope and handle them as they are passed around the room as their excitement and interest grows.

3) Hunting real fossils and sorting them
It is now the pupils turn to work in small groups to follow in the footsteps of Darwin, Mary Anning and other great fossil hunters by classifying real fossils using the same skills used by professional paleontologists.

** It is worth noting for schools on a tight budget that this is a Y6 adapted version of the sorting task from the Y3 fossils workshop if you wanted to combine the two year groups for a half day each.

4) The magnificent human body Evolution PE session
Shared from our Human Body workshop and tailored more towards evolution for this workshop, this unique activity combines both classroom science and PE to draw pupils' attention to the way their skeleton has evolved to cope with the demands placed up on it by the forces of nature.

"A perfect alternative to a school trip with more learning and less hassle to organise!" Kay, 5 teacher, Bolton