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Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Visit from a scientist

We love science in our class.
We have a mammy in our class who works with Medtronic in Galway.
She uses Science in her job every day.
Magda came to tell us all about her work.
 Magda's company make stents for people who have bad hearts.
We know that if you eat unhealthy foods and do not exercise enough, you can develop heart disease.
 This is what a stent looks like.
 Magda explained how stents are made, and how they can be placed in your heart through a vein in your leg or armpit.
When the stent is in place in your heart, it can be expanded and then left there to make sure that no more fat builds up in the arteries and veins of the heart.
Placing a stent in a diseased heart can save the life of a person who needs it.
 All the stents that are made must be kept really clean and sterile.
Magda explained what is done in her company to keep the clean room clean.
All the workers need to wear hair nets, white coats and white covers for their shoes to prevent any dirt or germs getting in to the stents.
They must wash their hands a lot to keep their hands clean and they must never come to work if they are sick.
 We think that Magda has a really interesting job and we are really impressed that she is using science to help save people's lives.
Thank you so much for such an interesting talk today!

Mixing colours

Today we used acetates and colour paddles and sweet wrappers
to investigate what happens when we mix colours.
We found lots of interesting combinations!
 

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Our eyes are playing tricks

We made some great spinners:
When we spin the pencils we can see
a fish in a fishbowl
an astronaut on the moon
a dog in a kennel
a bird in a birdcage
a monkey in a tree
a lion in a cage
This is because our eyes are faster than our brains
so we see both pictures one at a time
but our brains can't go that fast and so they think we just see the two together.
This is fun to try!

Thursday, September 11, 2014

A giant parsnip

When we went out to our school garden today Kay (who helps us with our garden) and Ms. Lavery showed us an enormous parsnip that was grown in the senior school this summer.
Yummy!

Gardening with Kay

We are really enjoying the sunshine and spending as much time as we can outside.

We have been weeding the school's garden, collecting seeds that we will plant in Spring and getting advice from Kay about what we could plant for the Winter.

Kay showed us some edible flowers and leaves in our garden and some of us even tasted them!

We even got our hands on a GIANT parsnip that was grown in the senior school's garden.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Making rainbows and shadows

It is a lovely sunny day.
We spent some time outside today learning about the colours of light.
We know that a rainbow has the colours 
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
We used glass prisms to break the light from the sun into the colours of the rainbow.
Dath dearg, dath oráiste, agus dath buí
Dath glas, dath gorm, dath corcora, 
Hey, bogha báistí.
Here are some nice songs about rainbows:


Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Weather recording and school garden

Each day we record the weather.
We record the daily temperatures with a thermometer and we use a rain gauge to measure the amount of rainfall each day.  Along with our classroom weather calendar we are confident we are measuring the weather correctly each day.
 Our school recently won the Tidy Towns Best School Garden.
We went visiting our garden today.
We looked at the colours in our garden, we looked at the bugs and insects there and we looked at the lovely beans growing inside the bean pods.  We are proud of our garden.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

10 years of science awards!

We have received an Award of Science and Math Excellence
every year
for 10 YEARS!
We are so proud!
Today Aine Scully from Abbott came to present us with a fabulous star shaped plaque and a cheque for Shaw's Scientific, to buy ourselves some science equipment.
Thank you so much Aine!
We had some wonderful talks from Ms. Lavery's class who told us all about the heart, Ms. Ferguson's class who told us of their beach safari and Ms. Costello's class who told of their trip to the aquarium.
Aine also went to Mr. Carleton's and Ms. Connolly's classes where she heard all about the Junior First Lego robotics league.
 
Aine finished up in our class where she heard all about space.  She even had time to visit our garden and to help us launch water rockets.
Many thanks for your wonderful visit Aine!