Some Heat Experiments

Room 5 have been busy trying a few heat experiments. We have made spiral snakes. We coloured them and cut them out. We hung some over the radiator, beside the window, and we hung others in the middle of the room. Some of our snakes became disco dancing snakes but the others became sleepy snakes. Can you guess which were which?

That's right! The snakes over the heater move because hot air rises and move the snakes. The snakes in the middle of the room have no moving air under them so they stay still.

The next experiment we tried was holding a table tennis ball over a hair dryer. The rising hot air keeps the ball floating in the air. The experiment doesn't work with a heavy bouncy ball (too heavy for the air to lift) and with a light foam ball (too light to stay in the warm air flow so it gets knocked over very quickly).

We completed some experiments in Miss Costello's 2nd class this week.

1.We learned that warm air is lighter than cold air and therefore warm air rises and cold air comes in to take its place. This causes air currents. We made Snake Spirals and placed them above the radiators in our class. The air above the radiator is warm and rises and makes the snake spin. Come into our class for a look if you like.

2. We completed some experiments to learn more about ‘Myself’ – we took our fingerprints, checked which eye is our dominant eye and we found out about the blind spot.
We know everybody’s fingerprints are different.
We know everyone has a dominant eye and the brain can get confused as to where an object is or it may see double.

3. The Armagh Planetarium came to visit our school on the 20th of November.
We learned a lot about electricity and the planets.

Here is a space chart that the senior infants (Room 5) made.

Egg....speriments!

It is Science Week. We did a few interesting experiments in science week. We found out that eggs sink in water, but if you add salt to the water, the egg can now float.

We know why this happens......We did another experiment that is almost the same.....Put some rice into a cup and then put a bouncy ball in the cup, and fill the cup with rice (covering the ball). Now if you shake the cup the bouncy ball will always come to the top. This is because the little rice pieces are so small that they always race to the bottom of the cup first, so the ball always ends up on top. (That's why crumbs are always at the bottom of a cornflakes box!) The eggs are the same. The salt in the water always pushes to the bottom (because it makes the water dense) so the egg ends up on top. Interesting isn't it?

We did another experiment to find out if eggs are raw or cooked. We made both eggs spin and then we tried to stop them spinning. The boiled egg is very well behaved, it stops when it is told. (It's like wearing a seatbelt in the car). The raw eggs stops spinning for a second, but spins again as soon as you take your hand away (like someone without a seatbelt in the car, keeps moving forward even if the car stops in a crash). You can spin an egg to see if it is cooked or not.

Acrobatic Clowns

Room 5 had fun with clowns today (9/11/07) We coloured some clowns and put coins on their hands. Without coins the clowns couldn't balance but when we put the coins on the clowns would balance anywhere..on our hands, on our noses and even on the top of a pencil!

3,2,1, Blast Off

Today Senior Infants Room 5 were talking about air. We tried to get a balloons to fly in a straight line. They never do. When you blow up a balloon and then let them go they fly in all directions.
We finally got a balloon to fly in a straight line by attaching the balloon to a string with a straw and some selotape. This time the balloon flew in a straight line. We even got the balloon to fly uphill and downhill by having one end of the string higher than the other.

Winter Trees

Senior Infants Room 5 went on a nature walk today to see trees in Winter. We saw evergreen and decidious trees. The decidious trees have lost their leaves now. The evergreen trees don't lose leaves in winter. We also saw black buds on the Ash tree and sticky brown buds on the Horse Chestnut tree.