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

Planting seeds

We learned all about plants and the conditions necessary for growth. Then we planted seeds and got to choose from 4 seeds of different colours. We watered them after planting and will continue to water them regularly. We also put one planted seed in a cupboard with no light (but we will water it regularly) and we will monitor its progress to see if it will grow in the dark or not. We will compare it to our plants which will be growing in the light. We also have one plant which we will not water (but will be exposed to light) and we will observe its progress also.

Solar eclipse

We learned all about solar eclipses in school yesterday so we were ready to see this one.
About half of the pupils in this class had brought cardboard boxes.

We put a pin prick in one side of the box and then could see an image of the sun (with the chunk gone out of it) on the other side of the box.  This worked really well.

We took turns so everyone got to see the eclipse.

Teacher also showed us how to see the eclipse by putting a pin prick in a piece of cardboard and then holding this in front of a sheet of white paper.  This worked the same as the boxes.

Teacher tried to take a picture of the eclipse without looking at all.  Disastrous!

In another class they had a special viewer.  We went to look at this but unluckily the clouds covered the sun just then so we didn't get a clear look.

We also kept an eye on what was happening with the eclipse by viewing a live stream on the whiteboard.  What an exciting morning!

Tadpoles

Ms. Geraghty has been growing frogs.
She has an education licence to do this.

What started as frogspawn has grown into little tadpoles.

She is going to release the tadpoles back into their pond before they turn into frogs.

We have been learning about the life cycle of the frog so we were really interested.

All about bubbles

We had a lesson on bubbles in our class last week.
Today we took the bubbles outside and looked at colours, how they fly on the wind, what they look like before they burst.  We loved this lesson!