Alfie comes to visit

Today Alfie the rabbit came to visit. We all enjoyed watching him jump around our circle and all used our gentle hands when giving him a pat. We wrote some great stories about Alfie and will be hanging these up for everyone to read.

We used interesting words to describe him like fluffy, soft, nervous and bouncy.

Alfie will be coming in again so make sure you come in to say hello :)

Thank you

A big thank you for all the birthday messages last week. It was a lovely day and the children all enjoyed sharing my cake with me. Yummy!

Floating fruit

We are learning to give a hypothesis and to conduct an experiment.

Today my initial question was; 

What will happen if I put an orange in water?

We made a chart predicting whether it would float or sink.

Then we watched carefully as the orange was put in the water. The orange floated on top of the water.

I then asked the children what would happen if I peeled the orange, there were various predictions so we created another list. 

There was some excitement when we discovered that the peeled orange sunk!

Our discussion about why this happened made us think about other fruits  and led us to investigate further.

Getting a big plastic container we added 

* an apple (it floated)

* a pear (it sunk)

* a banana (it floated)

* a kiwifruit (it sunk)

However, we do have curious minds in Room 3, so we investigated more by cutting the fruit in half  and then peeling the banana to see if we would get any differing results. 

The big question of the afternoon was this:

  Why did a peeled orange sink but a peeled banana still float????

Fraction sandwiches

In maths, we have been learning about fractions. We have talked about equal and equal sizes and halves and fourths (quarters)

On Friday we showed our knowledge by cutting up our own sandwiches. We had to think about how we would cut it up if we had to share with 1 friend and then if we had to share with 3 friends. (1/2 and 1/4)

Once we had cut it into fourths, we were allowed to eat one fourth then had to think about how much was left.

We also discussed how 1/2 is the same as 2/4.

You could try this at home, what things can you cut up in equal pieces to share?

Making a bouncy egg

Can we make an egg bouncy?

We left an egg soaking in vinegar overnight to see what would happen.

We observed that there were lots of bubbles all over the egg and that the egg seemed to be getting bigger. 

After 1 day we got the egg out but oops! Ms Soljan was a bit rough and it broke :( 

So like good scientists we tried again, this time we put it in a bigger container and waited and watched.

After 1 day we got it out and saw that it was:

* bouncy

* soft

* like a ball

* squishy

* white

We observed that:

* the shell 'graded' off

* the vinegar made it white like a boiled egg

Because we are scientists, we left the egg soaking over the long weekend and wow!

It was:

* turning clear, we could even see the yolk inside
* quite a bit bigger
* very bouncy
* heavy and slimy

Making a lava lamp and more explorations

Today we made a lava lamp. We started by putting water and oil in a bottle, once the oil had settled and stopped bubbling we added some food colouring and a berroca tablet.

The berocca tablet made it all bubbly, with the blobs of red colouring floating up and down in the water.

Once we had completed this experiment and talked about why it happened, we revisited our findings about oil and water not mixing and the reasons why.  I asked the children if they thought it would make a difference if we had more oil and less water.

The class were split, 11 believed the water and oil would mix if there was more oil and 7 believed it still wouldn't mix. 

What did we find out?

We found out that it did not matter how much water we had, the oil always sits on top of the water.

Science in a van

The very interesting Science in a Van people came in to show us some cool experiments and to teach us about mixtures, reactions and separations.

Here are some of the exciting things we saw: