Snake spirals

We made some great spiral snakes.

One set are hanging in the middle of the classroom and one set are hanging by the window.

We are trying hard to figure out why the ones by the window never stop moving while the ones in the middle of the room are always still.

What a mystery??????

Could it have anything to do with the hot air rising from the radiator by the window?

Famous!

Famous! We are thrilled to have been mentioned on this wonderful Primary Science site: 

Scroll down until you see us mentioned:

Growing seeds

We have just signed up for what looks like a wonderful project.

We can't wait to get started!

Ramps, friction and gravity

We have been talking about forces, and also about which shapes roll and which don't.

Today we had to guess which of the following objects would roll on the ramp and which wouldn't.

Spool, car, topper, cork on its end, paper clip, sphere.

We guessed the spool, car and sphere would roll. The others have no circular end (except for the cork which rolled when we put it on its side), and so would not roll.
Gravity helps pull the objects to the ground, and friction slows them down (as does bumping into lollipop sticks, as we discovered)

The car and the sphere rolled best.

We used lollipop sticks to measure how far each item rolled.

Here is the result.

After this we raised the ramp to see if this would make any difference to how far the object would travel. 

It really did.

Our ball travelled 3 sticks further with the higher ramp and the car rolled a further 6 sticks even further than the sphere.

We loved testing this!

Bridges

Today we talked about all sorts of bridges.

We tried making bridges to see which kind would be the strongest.

We tried one sheet of paper, two sheets of paper, a folded page, a page like a fan and a page with an arch underneath.  Can you guess which was the strongest?

A visit from Kevin of the Irish Fisheries Board

As part of the work we are doing for our school's next Green Flag, we had a visit today from Kevin.

He works for the Irish Fisheries Board.

He gave us a wonderful talk.

He talked to us about the water cycle, about conserving water and about how people animals and fish like clean water rather than polluted water.

We learned all about different kinds of animals, fish and insects that make the Irish waterways their home.

We also learned all about how salmon lay eggs and the wonderful job that the fisheries board do in  helping keep the salmon numbers in Ireland constant.
We are going to continue to take great care not to waste water and not to throw our rubbish anywhere except in bins!
Thank you Kevin for such a great talk.