Evolution and Inheritance - Battle of the Beaks!
This week, year six completed another of their science experiments for the year, following in the steps of Charles Darwin. The aim was to discover if a bird's beak type affects how it is able to pick up food. The children have been finding out about how Charles Darwin observed the finches of the Galapagos Islands and how they had adapted to eat different types of food.
First, the children discussed which variables they could change and decided to use the beak type as their independent variable. Their dependent variable would be how much food they were able to pick up. They collected their equipment (tweezers, cocktail sticks, pegs, pipe cleaners, macaroni, rubber bands and seeds) and predicted which "beaks" would work best at picking up which types of food and whether any of the "beaks" would easily pick up all the food types.
In HB15, we all agreed that the tweezers were best as the children could be really precise and accurate. I can confirm that we all had fun and learnt a lot about presenting our findings and conducting a fair test.