A newt in class

Emily and her dad found a newt in their dog's water bowl.

They brought the newt to school for us all to see.

We watched her (at least we think she is a girl) walking in the bowl.

After her visit to school she was brought home again to the garden from where she came.

Thanks Emily and Adrian for showing us such an interesting amphibian!

Worms and ants

We got our ant world and our wormery ready yesterday.

Today we added the guests:

29 worms and 20 ants.

We think they will be happy in our class!

Making a wormery

We have got our wormery ready.  We filled it up with layers of soil, sand and compost.

When our worms arrive we will add leaves and grass and some water for the worms to drink.

Then we should be able to see the tunnels that worms like to make in the soil.

Springtime

We have been busy planting peas, beans and cress! We are investigating what the best conditions are for plants to grow.

Replanting daffodils

Do you remember our bulbs we planted back in October? They grew into beautiful daffodils. So it's time for us to take them home and replant them in our gardens. Springtime is here.

Planting runner beans

Today Kay from Brigids Garden came to visit us. We have lots of garden beds around the school. We have the job to plant runner beans. We talked about the story Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack had magic beans that he planted and a beanstalk grew all the way up to a castle. So we planted magic beans with the help of Kay. We placed a castle on a stick to help support our beanstalk. Kay will be back in a few weeks to see their progress.

Sound, hearing and skeletons

We learned lots today about sound and hearing.

Teacher showed us how to blow straws to get a great sound.  The longer the straw the lower the sound and the shorter the straw the higher the sound.

We have a whistle in class with a sliding piece.  When you pull out the sliding piece the whistle looks longer and has a lower sound.  When you push the sliding piece in the whistle looks shorter and has a higher sound. We know that sounds are vibrations.  We have seen some great films about this too.

Try out this great sound game:

You could also try out a movement and skeleton game since we talked about skeletons today too:

Our sense of taste

We each brought one fruit and one vegetable to school today.

First of all we sorted the fruit and vegetables.

 

Here are all the vegetables and fruits we got to try today.

Teacher made a fruit salad from the fruit we had left over after our tasting session on Friday.

She handed out a cocktail stick to everyone and we made our own fruit kebabs with 3 different pieces of fruit on each. DEEEEEELICIOUS!

Greenwave: Horse Chestnut

We are looking out for the signs of spring.
Today we checked out the Horse Chestnut tree in our school and the two Horse Chestnut trees in the field across from the the school.  The buds are just beginning to burst.  We can see the new leaves and the candles.

Our senses: Touch, see, hear

We are talking about our senses.

Today we played some senses games.

We had a feely bag filled with nature objects.

We talked about shape, texture, hard/soft, rough/smooth, hot/cold.

We answered questions and took guesses before finding out what was in the bag.

Next we had a hearing "find the shell" game.

One child went outside the door.  When he came back again we clapped slowly if he was far from the shell and we clapped more quickly if he was close to the shell.  This was a fun game.

Lastly we put on a blindfold and got a friend to help lead us around the classroom without bumping into things.  We also tried using a sight stick.  We are glad that all of our senses work so well!

Teacher found some medicine at home that has Braille writing on it.

She brought the boxes to school so that we could try reading the dots with our fingers.

Reading Braille is very difficult, it is not like the reading we do in our class.

It is great that we can all use our sense of sight and touch.  We are very lucky!

Gardening in Ms. Mc Cauls

Kay came to visit yesterday. We enjoyed tidying our garden and planting seeds. We weeded the garden. We planted onions, carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and mint. We are looking forward to watching our plants grow and hopefully tasting our delicious fresh produce in a few months time.