Forces: Push & pull pop up Santa toys

We made some wonderful pop up Santa toys.

Using push and pull forces it is easy to get Santa to go up and down the chimney!

Marine Science Fun

Today, Noirin from the Explorer's Project came into our class to talk to us about marine science. She showed us some dried sea creatures, including a starfish, a seahorse, a sea snail and a set of shark's teeth! We then did an experiment to determine whether fresh water is heavier than salt water. 

We put red food colouring in the salt water and as you can see, we discovered it is heavier than fresh water!

Engineers at work

 

 We made some really nice LEGO creations this morning.

Look at our wonderful house.

 We made a trophy!

 I made a LEGO police car!

 Here we are working on our robotics!

 We are getting good at coding/programming now.

 When we ran out of LEGO some of us made really interesting creations, with a construction barn set and with magnets.

We love constructing things and we love programming.

Floating balls

We were looking at floating balls today.

We can get a ping pong ball to float on the air stream from a hair dryer.

The air pushes the ball up and gravity keeps pulling it back down into the air stream.

In fact we can get two balls to float at the same time.

Can you guess what will happen when we try this out with a bouncy ball?

That's right!  The bouncy ball is not hollow in the middle and is not filled with air so it doesn't float on the stream of air, it just stays where it is when the heat is turned on.

Next we floated a ball and then we tried putting a cardboard tube over the floating ball.  

Look at what happens...the air is more concentrated and so moves faster as it goes through the tube.

This means that the force of air is stronger and the ball jumps up even higher than it did before.

We tried different combinations of bouncy ball, floating ball and floating ball and each time we had to guess how many balls would come out of the tube once the heat was turned on.  

We got good at guessing by the end of the experiment.

We think we should try these at home too.

Eggs speriments

We tried some experiments with eggs.

Teacher had some raw eggs and some cooked eggs in her egg box.

We had to guess which were the cooked eggs and which ones were raw.

Then teacher showed us how to tell them apart by spinning them.

The cooked egg spins well and stops as soon as you put your finger on top because the inside of the egg is all joined to the shell. (like a child in a car with a seat belt on will stop immediately the car comes to a sudden stop)

The raw egg takes longer to get spinning but stays spinning if you stop it with your finger then take your finger off the spinning egg. (like a child in a car with no seat belt on will continue to move forward even if the car comes to a sudden stop)

We also tried squeezing eggs to see how strong the shell is.

They are really really strong.  Do you know why?

It is to stop the mother hen from crushing her chicks when she sits on them to incubate them, keep them warm and help them hatch out of their shells.

Visit from a scientist

A scientist came to school and showed us lots of exciting experiments. We learned about magnetism, energy and forces, heat, sound and light. The experiments were very messy but lots of fun!