ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Personal, Social, Health, and Economic education (PSHE) and citizenship provide a context for learning about humans and other animals. It explores a range of strategies for eliciting children's ideas about humans, including annotated drawing, and for building on their ideas using visual models and secondary sources. The chapter describes scientific enquiries that are used to investigate humans, with a particular emphasis on pattern-seeking, and how these enquiries can be developed with primary-aged children. Reproduction is also about inheritable information, about how similarities and differences between living things can be understood, perhaps in terms of DNA and genetics and how these characteristics are passed between generations. In primary classrooms first-hand observation is a key aspect of scientific enquiry to develop in this topic area. Humans and other animals as a topic lends itself to developing scientific enquiry skills of observation and pattern-finding, and effective use of links with ICT and maths can support this.
