Using our senses

We have been talking about our senses, and playing games that use our senses.

Today we used our sense of touch when we played with the feely bag.

 We used our sense of sight (or lack of) when we took our friends blindfolded around the class.

Last week we used our sense of hearing when we guessed the sound and played the loud/soft game.
We used our sense of smell when we guessed what was in the various bottles and tomorrow we will use our sense of taste when we taste lots of fruits and vegetables.

Gardening with Kay

Kay came to help us with our gardening today.

It was raining heavily outside so we planted some magic beans inside in small pots.

We listened to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.

We hope that our beanstalks will grow very big, and that we can climb up our beanstalks and become rich.

Dangers of sound

Today we were talking some more about sounds.
We talked about annoying sounds, how loud sounds are useful for warning us of dangers, and how sounds get softer as they move away from us, and louder as they come nearer.

We tried covering our ears with our hands.  This muffled sounds around us but we could still hear our own voices.  Covering only one ear was very interesting...some sounds were muffled but others we could clearly hear with the ear that wasn't covered.  We discovered that we could hear more clearly when we cupped our hands behind our ears.

We played a find the toy game by clapping loud and fast any time the searcher was near the toy, and clapping slowly and quietly whenever the searcher was far away from the toy.

We used bags of water and sand to check to see what noises we could hear.

We discovered that both sand and water help muffle the sounds around us.  We could make good protective earmuffs using either sand or water!

We will keep ourselves safe by not listening to sounds that are very loud and could damage our hearing.

What's that smell?

We use our sense of smell every day.

Today we checked to see how good we are at recognising smells.

 We had no trouble with wash-up liquid, perfume, chlorine, coffee or vinegar 

but found it impossible to identify garlic or ginger.

We love science!

More planting

We planted lots more seeds today, some in our own pots and more in our garden patch.
We were amazed at the differences in the seeds.
Some were rough, some smooth, some big, some small, some round, some oval, some reminded us of asteroids or chocolate balls.  All the different types of seeds looked different.  We liked the big smooth coloured runner bean seeds the best and the asteroid looking beetroot seeds.

When planting them in the garden we made sure to label them well so we can remember where each plant is growing.
We also remembered to water them well.

We are looking forward to seeing them grow.

Sowing strawberries and cabbages

Grandad John came to visit our classroom on Monday with a strawberry plant and some cabbage plants for our garden.

But first we had to pull out last years cabbages which have gone to seed.,

This was quite a big job.  We acted like the family in the story of the enormous turnip and tried pulling it out together.  We succeeded in the end after a lot of pulling and tugging.

Next we separated out all the new little cabbage plants and planted them in a row.

We also planted our 4 strawberry plants from the Incredible Edibles.

Our garden is almost all ready for the nice weather now.

We watered our new plants of course and tomorrow we will plant some more vegetables and flowers.

We love gardening.

Sound and hearing

We are learning all about our senses.

We see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste with our tongues, smell with our noses and touch with our hands.

This month we are especially focusing on sound and hearing.

Teacher asked us to make as many different noises with our bodies as we could.

We tried slapping, clapping, humming, talking, scratching, clicking, sniffing, stamping and whistling.

We were amazed at how many different kinds of noises we could make.

We played a sound game.

Teacher had made 6 sound boxes.  We rattled each one in turn and then had to guess what was in each box.  After we had guessed teacher got out the sound cards and we had to match each sound card with the sound box.  We really loved checking whether we were correct or not (we were, each time, yay!)

We had a look at our box of musical instruments.

We classified these musical instruments into

musical instruments that make noise when you beat them and

musical instruments that make noise when you shake them (notice that the tambourine is in both groups!)

We had no musical instruments in class that make sounds when you blow them like whistles, trumpets, flutes and tin whistles, but we talked about all of these, along with instruments that have strings to make music (guitars, violins, double bass, harps).

After arranging elastic bands in order of size we noticed that small elastics make very high sounds while big elastics make very low sounds.

Teacher showed us how to make straw whistles.  She started with a long straw which made a low sound and then she cut a little of the straw off each time.  As the straw got shorter, the note got higher.  We really enjoyed playing our straw whistles (though they took a lot of practice at first!)

We really enjoyed learning more about sound with Tigtag videos

http://www.tigtagworld.com/

with concept cartoons http://conceptcartoons.com/science.html

and with EDpaX science http://www.memory4teachers.co.uk/channels/presentations/edpax/science.html