Racing colours

Teacher has some markers.

We think that some of the coloured markers are made up of two or more colours.

We tested this by putting a small spot of marker on to a tissue paper.

Then when the paper was put into a small cup of water, the colours started racing up the tissue.

We could see the colours pink and blue in purple, pink and yellow in orange, yellow and blue in green and yellow red and blue in the colour brown.

Conkers, chestnuts and spider plants

Leah found some wonderful chestnuts with conkers inside.

The chestnuts are very spiky.

The conkers inside are smooth and shiny.

Leah also found a really interesting nut, with squirrel teeth marks in it.

We are all very impressed.

Thank you Leah.

 Our class spider plants have grown really big.

Today teacher showed us how to transplant them into a bigger pot.

We were fascinated with the roots that are now growing in the shape of the small pot.

We will mind them carefully at home and remember to water them at least twice a week, or whenever they feel really dry. 

How big are my lungs?

We know that we have lungs to help us breathe.

We were wondering how big our lungs actually are?

We took a deep breath and tried to imagine how much air our lungs can hold.

Teacher showed us a way of seeing how much air is in our lungs.

Have a look at how we did this.

Flying helicopters

Teacher got some helicopters ready for us to fly.

We looked at all the rectangles in each helicopter (we counted 7).

We flew the helicopters and we got them to spin in different directions by changing the flaps.  We found that they didn't fly at all if the two flaps pointed in the same direction.

  We thought about how trees like the Sycamore use helicopters to spread their seeds.

Mixing colours and colour spinners

A few weeks ago we used prisms to break white light (sunshine) into the 7 colours of the spectrum.

Today we used spinners to see what happens when you spin the 7 colours of the spectrum very quickly.

What we found is that all the colours joined back together to make one off-white colour.  We really liked this.  We decided to test out other colour combinations.

We found that red and yellow spin to give orange (we also tried this with colour paddles and the wrappers from Quality Street sweets)

Blue and red spun to give purple

and these Benham discs spun to give some very interesting patterns.

We coloured our own spinners and then spun them with our fingers and with motors.

We learned a lot about light and colours.

Lion in a cage

We cut out a lion and stuck him on a pencil.

We also cut out a cage.  We stuck this on the other side of the pencil.

When you spin the pencil quickly enough it looks like the lion is in the cage.

This is because our brains are working more slowly than our eyes.  Our brains get all confused

 by the speed and think we are actually seeing the lion in the cage.

The enormous pumpkin

Mrs. Coleman grew some pumpkins in her garden in preparation for Hallowe'en. She couldn't believe it when she saw this enormous pumpkin. It grew in her garden and she brought it into school and placed it outside her office. All the teachers have to guess the weight and the teacher with the correct guess will win it for their classroom. Think how many bowls of pumpkin soup you would get out of this pumpkin!!!!!

Gardening with Kay

Kay came to visit today. We went out to our school garden. We were really busy. We helped to clean up the garden after the Summer by digging up the weeds. We saw lots of interesting animals like snails and spiders. We also dug up three carrots and picked some peas. We love gardening. Kay will be back in the Spring again to help us plant more vegetables.

A giant pumpkin

Volcanoes

Here are a few photos of our experiment to show a volcano erupting.

 We used baking powder, vinegar and food colouring.