Wonderful day at the beach

We had the BEST DAY EVER!

Dr. Noirín Burke from the aquarium helped us to locate and identify lots of shells, crabs and other little creatures in the rock pools.  We are SO good at finding and collecting sea life.

We especially loved splashing in the rock pools!

Caterpillars ready to spin cocoons

Our caterpillars are now staying right at the top of their jar.

We think they are very close to spinning their cocoons now.

Preparing for our seashore visit

We can't wait to go on our seashore safari tomorrow.

Today we did some fun maths with seashore animals.

 Counting all the animals and deciding how to sort them.

 Sorting according to families.

 Sorting according to colours.

 Sorting according to size.

 Animals with/without shells or fins.

 Following instructions.

 After all our sorting we had a great chat about how littering on the beach can affect animals and plants on the seashore and in the water.

 We also made a list of all the things we hope to find at the seashore tomorrow.

The things we are likely to find are in blue while the things we are unlikely to find have been written in red.

Bigger caterpillars

Remember the caterpillars that arrived exactly two weeks ago.

Look at how big they have become.

What does a plant need? Week 2

Look at how our plants are thriving.

It just shows what you need to grow a plant.

Tub 1 got water, soil and light

Tub 2 got water and light but no sun

Tub 3 got water and soil but no light (it is going mouldy now)

Tub 4 got sun and light but no water

We all tried eating some of the cress in tub 1.

It was delicious!

How does our garden grow?

Here's how:

 Little apples

 Huge potatoes and cabbages!

 Onions and Tansy

 Peas and carrots

Sound: Experiments with tuning forks and string telephones

We are learning lots about sound.

We know that sounds are made from vibrations and that sounds can travel through air, through solids and through liquids.

Today we tested how sound travels through string when we used string telephones.

We had to keep the strings nice and tight and make sure that our fingers didn't touch the string.

The telephones work really well.

We also tried using tuning forks.

When you hit a tuning fork off the ground or a table, the prongs on the tuning fork vibrate.

We tried holding a vibrating tuning fork against a container of peas, a container of rice and against a ping pong ball, all for very impressive results!

We got the peas and the rice to dance about as the tuning fork sent its vibrations to them (we even got a pea to hop out of the container entirely!)

We could hear the note the tuning fork made as we did this.

(Did you know that our tuning fork ALWAYS makes the same note:- we tried this out lots of times and it really is so!)

We got our ping pong ball to jump on the string when we brought the tuning fork beside it.

We even made yoghurt cartons and string sound like chickens!

What do seeds need to grow?

What does a plant need to grow?

Soil, water and light.

We planted 4 pots of cress.

We gave no water to one pot.  These seeds didn't even begin to grow.

We gave no soil to one pot (we gave it tissue instead).   These seeds are growing, but not very well.

We gave no light to one pot.  These seeds are growing, but not very well, and they are turning yellow.

The final pot of seeds is growing really well.

We can't wait to see what will happen next week.

Designing boats

Did you know that a ball of marla sinks?

We tried this out and it is true.

Teacher gave each of us exactly the same sized sphere of marla.

We had to make a boat that could float.

When we got our boats to float teacher gave us passengers (dried peas) to put in to our boats.

We had to try and load the boat with as many passengers as we could.

The winning boat was able to take 24 passengers before it sank!

Our caterpillars have arrived

We ordered baby caterpillars and today they arrived by post.

We were delighted.

The 5 little caterpillars are SOOO small.

We can't wait to see our caterpillars spin cocoons, then emerge as butterflies.

We wonder how long this will take?

Visit from Medtronic-dissecting a heart