This half-term is the turn of year 2 pupils to attend STEM Club. We have been focusing on comparing animals and humans to see who makes the best use of their senses and their physical attributes. So far they have investigated if they can hear as well as a hawk, run as fast as a cheetah and hear as well as an elephant. They used a range of different activities to test this and we were lucky enough to be able to get outside onto the school field due to the improved weather. Unfortunately class 2 found that the animals were superior in these areas!
This week however, it was time to demonstrate something that makes humans superior to lots of animals when it comes to fine motor skills tasks such as tying shoelaces, handwriting and picking things up. Of course animals don’t need to be able to tie laces or write anything but they do need to be able to feed themselves. Some animals have trunks or beaks or long tongues to achieve this and some of course do have fingers and opposable thumbs. We investigated how many pasta pieces the pupils could pick up in ten seconds with their finger and thumb. We then repeated it wearing a mitten! The pupils soon discovered how much harder it was to pick up the pasta when wearing mittens and were happy to discover a task that they would be better at than lots of animals!
