Visit to the seashore

We went on a beach trip today.

We built sandcastles and looked for buried treasure.

We collected shells, feathers, seaweed and crabs.

We were very careful to leave the beach clean and tidy after us.

What a great day at the beach!

Harvesting our potatoes

Our garden looks great.

Today we harvested the potatoes we have been growing in a bag.

We planted 4 potatoes.  Look at how many we harvested!

We all took 2 potatoes home each.

We are so proud of our farming skills!

Releasing our butterflies

Our butterflies came out of their cocoons last Saturday (3 of them) and Sunday.

Teacher brought them fruit and sugared water to drink while their wings hardened.

Our painted lady butterflies are beautiful.

Today we went outside and released them back into the wild so they can enjoy life and have families of their own.

They all flew off and we said goodbye to them.

Then a terrible thing happened..........a little willy wagtail bird followed one of our butterflies, caught it and ate it as we watched.  We were so sad to have seen this, but we understand all about the food chain, and it was sad but interesting to see the food chain in action.

Here is all that remains of our poor butterfly!

Learning all about bugs

Tom is usually the bird man.

He knows all about birds (and he is really good at origami too).

Today he came to our class to tell us all about Irish butterflies, moths, flies and bees.

We really enjoyed learning all about the bugs around us.

We especially liked learning how to make origami butterflies.

Mini beast hunt

We really enjoyed our mini beast hunt yesterday.

We can tell whether a bug is an insect or not.

A bug with 6 legs and 2 parts on his body is an insect.  Otherwise it is not an insect at all.

5 cocoons

All 5 of our caterpillars are now in their cocoons.

We gave each cocoon a name before transferring it to our butterfly garden.

We can't wait for all the cocoons to emerge as beautiful Painted Lady butterflies.

Our first cocoon

One of our 5 caterpillars is now in its cocoon.

Our caterpillars at 2 weeks

Our caterpillars at 2 weeks!

A hen and chicks in school

Ms. McGrath brought us a hen and lots of gorgeous fluffy black and yellow chicks from her farm today.

It was so exciting to see them in school.
We loved the way the mother hen pushed all her little chicks under her wings when she was worried about them.  What a lovely mum!

Floating boats

We had a great time talking about boats today.
We have already looked at things that float and things that sink.
The big shell surprised us; it was big and heavy but it floated fine.
Teacher gave us each a sphere of marla.
We found that it sinks.
Now we tried making this marla into a floating boat.
It was quite a challenge, but we did it in the end!

Next we competed to see how many passengers each boat could safely hold.
We recorded and then compared results.
Our best boat could safely hold 28 passengers!
When every pair had a turn we lined up the boats according to the most passengers each could hold.
The most interesting discussion of all was the one in which we tried to find out why some boats won't float at all.
We decided that it is best to have a boat with a thin bottom, high sides and  no holes.
When we fixed the sinking green boat so that it became a boat with a thin bottom, high sides and no holes it floated very well.
Now that we are such expert boat makers we each made a boat out of clay.
We know that these will not float (because the clay absorbs water) we went about making our favourite kinds of boats.....submarines, boats to hold snowmen, boats with sails, cruise ships etc.
We are really interested in boats now!