Science: Upper key stage 2

Providing full curriculum coverage for science and developing pupils’ skills and knowledge across five key areas: Animals, including humans, Living things and their habitats, Materials and Forces, Earth and space.

Choose your unit

Following the units in the order set out is best to ensure a coherent approach to the progression of skills and knowledge in upper KS2 for the Science scheme of work.

Year 5

Materials: Mixtures and separation

Pupils explore different types of mixtures and the different methods that can be used to separate them. They dissolve a range of substances, identify different solutions and investigate how temperature affects the time taken to dissolve. They design and create a water filter, sieve soil and evaporate solutions. 

Materials: Properties and changes

Broadening their experience of the properties of materials, children investigate hardness, transparency and conductivity and consider how these properties influence the uses of materials. They explore reversible changes, including dissolving and changes of state. Children compare these to irreversible changes, including rusting, burning and mixing vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. 

Forces and space: Earth and space

This unit will be available from 1st December 2023.

Living things: Life cycles and reproduction

This unit will be available from 9th February 2024.

Forces and space: Imbalanced forces

This unit will be available from 1st April 2024.

Animals: Human timeline / Making connections

This unit will be available from 31st May 2024.

Bringing together pupils’ learning from multiple Science units, helping them to make connections between the key concepts and skills.

Year 6

Living things: Classifying big and small

Children broaden their knowledge of how vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and micro-organisms are grouped using shared characteristics. They discover how Carl Linnaeus developed the Linnaean and binomial systems for classifying and naming living things. Pupils use and produce branching and number classification keys to sort and identify organisms.

Energy: Light and reflection

Proving that light travels in a straight line, children use this information to explain observations of reflection and shadows. Pupils investigate the effect of moving an object away from the surface it casts a shadow on and the relationship between the incoming and reflected rays on a mirrored surface. Exploring real uses of mirrors allow children to apply what they have learned about light throughout the unit.

Living things: Evolution and inheritance

This unit will be available from 1st December 2023.

Energy: Circuits, batteries and switches

This unit will be available from 9th February 2024.

Animals: Circulation and exercise

This unit will be available from 1st April 2024.

Making connections

This unit will be available from 31st May 2024.

Bringing together pupils’ learning from multiple Science units, helping them to make connections between the key concepts and skills.