Our Active School’s Committee has created a whole school Active challenge. The challenge is called “The Christmas Jumping Jacks Challenge”. Each class has a target number of “Jumping Jacks” to achieve over a 4 week period- ending on the 19th of December. Best of luck to all the classes!
In science class we learned about forces and friction. We saw Bill Nye The Science Guy on our IWB. He knows a lot about friction. We made card propellers (helicopters) and investigated how they worked when we dropped them from a height. We added weights (paperclips) The extra weight made the propellers spin faster. We used a large size propeller and a mini propeller. The mini one worked best, it spun really fast with two paper clips as weight. . It was good fun working with forces and friction. Here are some photos …
Today we started the first round games of our class draughts competition . We have been practicing for the past three weeks and 4th class helped train 3rd class and gave them lots of tips to use in a game. The competition will finish for Christmas. Everyone will get a prize for taking part, even if they are not winners. It’s the taking part that is important. Each game has a referee to keep the games fair. Good luck everyone !
As a science investigation we made iron gall ink by crushing oak galls and putting them in 200ml water with an iron nail. At first the ink was dark brown so we left the mixture for two weeks and the ink got darker, almost black. Grey hairy mould started to grow on top of the mixture so we guessed it was time to use our ink. We used a feather quill just like in the old days. The ink was difficult to use because it was very runny and we made quite a few blobs. It got used up quickly from the quill and we had to keep dipping. Here is some of our inky handwriting…….
We decided to keep one jar of our ink and left it safely on the windowsill but first we took out the rusty iron nail. Just this week we noticed that our ink had disappeared completely , the crushed oak gall had settled on the bottom of the jar and the water was almost completely clear ! No more ink ! We figured out that our ink disappeared because we took out the iron nail and that it was an important part of the experiment. No iron nail , no ink. We put another iron nail back into the jar and we will watch carefully to see if ink will be made.
There was great excitement for the Halloween costume competition. All the classes gathered in the hall for assembly first and then the costume parade began. The infants loved the parade. some of the costumes were funny and some were scary. Every one got a turn to show off their costume. The best fun was playing out side on the yard in them. Here are some photos ……..
Third and fourth class went out side for INTERNATIONAL MATHS WEEK and practiced all our measurement skills. It was good fun abut we were busy moving from station to station. We used trundle wheels, tape measures and metre sticks. We even measured in footsteps. We also practiced our estimation skills, some were very accurate but some were a little crazy, we got better at estimating distances as we went from station to station. We were better at estimating the longer distances. Here is our video…….