Class wildlife

After the long weekend our caterpillars have really grown very big.

Emily brought a newt to school.  We really enjoyed looking at her.  We think she will have babies soon.

Emily also found a centipede and a yellow and black ladybird in her garden and Lauren brought in some empty snail shells.  Where did the snails go?

Jack made a great mini beast playground.  I'd say that the mini beasts can't wait to try it out.

Great work everyone!

Ms McCaul's Class-Lego League

Caterpillars

We have started growing caterpillars in our class. At the moment they are still small, but eating lots and soon they will grow to be much bigger! It won't be long before we have to move them so that they can become butterflies!!!

Mayflies

On Wednesday Ms Ferguson brought in some mayflies. Her Dad uses mayflies to catch trout on Lough Corrib. We all had a chance to let a mayfly sit on our hands. The are green when they are fresh and turn grey/black after a few days. Trout only like to eat green ones. We can catch them on the rocks of the lake shore and in the trees on the shore.

A box of mayflies

A big Thank You to Ms. Ferguson who brought some mayflies to our class.

She explained how they are used by fishermen to catch fish.

We really enjoyed having them walk on our hands.

Boats for passengers

We have been talking about floating and sinking.

We notice that a ball of marla will sink when dropped into water.

With a little practice we were able to make boats out of the marla.

We could get these boats to float.

Next we added passengers (dried peas).

One of the boats could even hold 42 dried peas!

That's the boat teacher would like to travel on!

Rockets experiment

We did a brilliant experiment with a drink bottle and a pump.
When you pump air in with a  bottle one third filled with water ,it explodes and zooms off like a rocket!
The children had great fun retrieving the bottle!

Summer nature walk

We took advantage of the lovely weather to go on a summer nature walk .The trees are in full bloom and the birds are chirping away :)

Electricity in Junior Infants

We've been learning about electricity! This week we worked together and used a battery, wires and a bulb to make light!

Minibeast hunt

With the arrival of some nice weather (finally!) we went out and about on a quest to find some minibeasts!!! We saw some ants, a beetle and this garden snail!

Our outdoor classroom

The weather was lovely today.

We went outside to learn some interesting things about the world around us.

First of all we went on a bug hunt (after learning to use the identification keys).

We found mainly centipedes and woodlice, but we also found a spider, some beetles and a millipede.

After putting our bugs carefully back where they came from we went to see a blue tit nest.

The nest was in a bird box in the tree.

We could see the mammy and daddy bird fly in and out of the nest.

We were delighted to be invited to see a webcam of the inside of the nest by Ms. Barrett in the senior school.  We could see the 8 little birds with their beaks open looking for food from their parents.

We think the little blue tit birds made their nest from the cut grass, so we tried making little grass nests ourselves.  We were quite good at this.

We love learning all about nature around us.