Planting spider plants

We planted these Spider Plants in September. We got the baby spider plant cuttings from a big spider plant which teacher had in class. We know that our plants need soil, water and light to grow. We are tending to them carefully and are watching them gradually grow. 

Learning about our lungs

We have been talking about our bodies.

Today we wondered where the air goes in our bodies when we take a big breath. 

We considered that the breath might go to our tummies (but that is for food), to our heart (but that is for blood), to our boobs (they are for milk), to our chest (yes, but where?) or to our skeletons (but they are for our bones).

Now we know that each breath we take goes to our lungs.

This is what one lung would look a bit like:

When our ribs squash in and our diaphragms squash up the air is forced to leave our lungs.

When our ribs move out and our diaphragms move down then the air rushes into our lungs.

the balloon is like the lung, the cut balloon on the bottom is like the diaphragm and the bottle is like our ribs.  We can see how it all works now.

Teacher also told us how our nice pink lungs can end up brown or black if we smoke.

We like our lungs to work well so we think that smoking is not such a good idea!

So...then we were wondering how big our lungs really are.

Well, if we can blow water out of a bottle we can see how much air we had in our lungs.

We tried this.

We have quite big lungs, but teachers are enormous (she emptied the WHOLE bottle!)

Lastly we talked about what happens when we sneeze (or cough).  How fast does your breath travel then (about the speed of a car) and how far would it travel.

We can't see breath or germs so teacher filled a balloon with glitter and flour before blowing up the balloon.

We couldn't wait to burst the balloon and see how far and how fast the air and germs travel.

AMAZING!
We will definitely try and catch our sneezes and our coughs in our elbows to prevent our sneezes and germs travelling all over the class.
We are becoming lung experts!

Planting a tree for Tree Day

For Tree Day today we planted a tree.

Actually we planted a conker (from a horse chestnut tree).

This is now on our windowsill in the light and it has been watered.

We will water it each week and hopefully we will have a small Horse Chestnut tree growing in March.

Tree Day, October 9th 2014

Technology in our jobs

We have a mammy in our class who works with Hewlett Packard.

She works in quality control and today she was explaining all about her job.

It sounds really interesting.

Dee uses technology in her job every day.
Her company makes computers, and printers and apps for phones and computers.

Today she brought us in some really interesting products that are made by HP (along with some cool pens, highlighters, luggage labels, notebooks, voice recorder and coffee mug for teacher!....wonderful souvenirs, thank you!)

HP makes some products that allow you to talk into a voice recorder, then have your recording typed automatically by the computer.  Wouldn't that save teachers (and secretaries so much work)?  HP even have a product that allows you to speak directly into headphones and have your voice recognized by the computer and your typing done automatically!  We love the sound of this!

Dee showed us the work she does in HP.  It involves checking each product before it leaves the factory to make sure that nothing is missing from each box they sell.  We can see how useful the highlighters are for this job!

Thank you so much Dee for your wonderful talk and to you and HP for the lovely souvenirs you gave us today.  Thumbs up from all of us.  We can't wait to start recording our own voices!

Looking at Autumn leaves

 Looking at Ash leaves

and Oak leaves, but no sign of acorns!

 What's on the back of this oak leaf?

 

 Horse Chestnut leaves:  where are conkers?

 Hazel leaves but no hazelnuts!

 Collecting leaves and a green shield (stink) bug.

Leaf display

 Our leaf rubbings

Harvesting

Today we were talking all about how bread is made.

We learned about harvesting, turning wheat into grain then into flour and finally bread.

Here is an interesting video we watched.

Planting spider plants

 Teacher has three big spider plants in the class.

These spider plants have baby spider plants growing out of them.

 Today we planted the baby spider plants so that we have one each.

We will give these plants light (they are on the window sill) and we will water them each PE day.

We hope they will grow well.

Signs of Autumn

A girl from Ms. Crotty's class make a wonderful Autumn shoe box garden.

Today we talked all about the signs of Autumn.

Can you spot the mushrooms? pine cones? crab apples? sycamore helicopters? conkers?

Did you know that blackberries turn green and red before they turn black?

Did you know that conkers fall in an outer shell called a chestnut.

Conkers come from the Horse Chestnut tree.

We have a Horse Chestnut tree in our school.

We will visit it tomorrow if it is a dry day.