The bloodmoon lunar eclipse

Here are a few photos that teacher took during the eclipse.

 The best time to have watched it was between 2am and 4am on Monday morning.

No wonder we were so tired yesterday!

Here's a YouTube time lapse video of the lunar eclipse.

Autumn leaves and seeds

We have lots of ash leaves with their helicopter seeds, and some ask twigs with their black buds.

We also have horse chestnut chestnuts and conkers.

Our local environment: The seashore

We went for a walk to Ballyloughane beach.

There were lots of interesting houses, signs and things of interest along the way.

We paired up with Ms. Cunningham's class and had a partner we have never had before.

On the beach each pair had a plastic container which we filled with lots of interesting things.

We found lots of things that belong on the seashore like shells, crabs, seaweed and stones.

We also found things that don't belong on the beach like a necklace, a hat, a sock, a golf ball, a large ball, a piece of plastic and a lock.

Have a look at all that we found.

...

Experiments with soil

Plants and light

We know that plants need light, soil, air and water to grow.

We started an investigation today that will last at least 5 weeks.

Each group planted one container of runner beans and sunflower seeds (after first putting holes in the cups for drainage, and putting in compost).

3 of the pots will be put on the windowsill in the light, while the other 3 pots will be in the cupboard with no light.

We will water our plants every morning and see what happens to the growing plants.

It will be interesting to compare the two groups.

How much water can we soak up?

We have been talking about different materials and their properties.

We have talked about waterproof and absorbent materials.

Today we decided to see just how absorbent some materials are.

The materials we had in class were plastic, a page from a magazine, kitchen towel, tissue and newspaper.

To begin we had a guess as to which material would be most absorbent (or best for soaking up water).

Here is what we guessed...most of us thought the kitchen towel would be best, and no one at all thought that the magazine would be good for soaking up spills.

We wanted our experiment to be fair, so we poured exactly the same amount of coloured water (10ml) into 5 small glasses.  We also got teacher to cut the materials into EXACTLY the same size squares so it would be a fair test.

Next we decided that the best way to test how much water got absorbed was to try soaking it up and then pouring the left over water back into the container to see how much water didn't get absorbed.

This took a steady hand!

Here we are trying the kitchen towel,

the magazine,

the plastic,

the newspaper,

and finally the tissue.

Now we compared how much water was left over (not absorbed) after using different materials to soak up the water.

We arranged the materials in order from the most absorbent (soaked up most) to the most water proof (soaked up least).  Here are our results:

Kitchen towel was most absorbent (1ml left over), then tissue (2ml), newspaper (3ml), magazine (8ml) and last of all was plastic (9ml....it only soaked up 1ml!).

We wrote up the amounts of water left over after the soaking.

Now we know which materials are best to use whent mopping up spills.

We learned lots about waterproof and absorbent materials today.

September gardening with Kay

We were in our school garden today with Kay.

She showed us poppy seed pods, various mini-beasts, onion flowers, lettuce that had bolted and is starting to flower and lots of other plants in our garden.

We will look after our garden well.

We found a caterpillar on the cabbage leaves.

We have brought him to our classroom and will watch as he turns into a cocoon.

We will feed him cabbage leaves and water from the water butt.

...

Materials and a Microscope

Today is Lauren's and Alyssa's birthdays.

They are both 8.

In honour of the birthdays and because we are discussing materials, teacher had a game of Pass The Parcel for us to play in class.  This game had a bit of a twist though......each time the music stopped you had to identify the material and say whether it was hard/soft, rough/smooth, absorbent/waterproof, transparent/opaque and what it is normally used for before opening the parcel.

  Inside the parcel each time was a mathematical 2D shape which had to be identified and sides and corners counted before you earned your prize.  This game was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about materials and also about 2D shapes.

We were very interested in the materials and were thrilled to hear that teacher has a microscope so we could look at each material under the microscope.

...

Mini beast hunt

We have been talking all about materials in our surroundings, and in our gardens and school ground in particular.

 Today we headed outside to discover what kind of mini beasts and bugs we share our school with.  Here are some things we discovered:

...

It is very easy to find mini beasts if you know where to look (log piles are home to so many different types of bugs).
Armed with pooters (for sucking up bugs), bug viewers (for catching and keeping bugs) and identification guides and identification keys (for identification) we headed around the senior school.
We found and collected lots of interesting mini beasts:- woodlice, beetles, centipedes, slugs, a harvest man,worms, a giant spider and even an angry wasp.  We guessed the wasp was angry because he was flying around the viewer very quickly and trying to get out.
We had a good look at all our minibeasts.  We counted legs, looked for antannae, looked at colours and patterns.  We used the identification guide and keys to help us identify the bugs we were not sure of.
Here are a few interesting things we learned:
All insects have six legs.  If they do not have six legs they are not insects. (Woodlice have 14 legs, spiders have 8 legs so neither are insects)
Snails never ever leave their shells.  They are born with a shell which grows as they grow.  Slugs are not snails without shells.  Slugs will never ever have a shell.
A honeybee will die after stinging. Wasps can sting again and again.
Apart from mini beasts we also found some other interesting things like fungus (mushrooms), blackberries (green, then red, then black), feathers and poppy seeds in their pod.
We were very careful to release all our bugs back in their own environment before we went back to class.
We really enjoyed our mini beast hunt today.

All about soil

Yesterday we talked about soil and how soil is made by weathering and erosion.

Teacher promised to bring a bag of soil to school today so we could do some tests on it.

We broke into groups and each group had a different task to do.

The yellow group used magnifying glasses and tweezers to investigate what exactly was in the soil sample.  We found roots, a dead snail, a worm, a stone, and bits of grass.

The red group used a garden sieve to break the soil into smaller pieces.  We also used magnifying glasses to see what was in the soil.  We found lots of little stones and a shell.

The green table investigated if soil sinks or floats.  We put soil into a bottle and added lots of water.  The soil and water were mixed together and then left to settle.  After a little while we could see the brown water becoming lighter in colour and we noticed that most of the soil sinks, but little pieces of soil, wood, roots and grass float.

(This is what it looked like after leaving it to settle all night...the water is much clearer now)

The white table and the blue tables had a bit of a competition.
Each table tried to make dirty water (water mixed with soil) clean again.
They did this using filters.
The white group used filters made from stones, sand and cotton wool (in that order, we hoped the stones would catch the biggest pieces of soil, the sand would catch the smaller pieces and the cotton wool would catch all the small pieces that were still left) to filter the water, while the blue group used just a coffee filter to filter the water.  We all had a guess before we started as to which filter would work better.  Here is what we guessed:

Which do you think will work better?
Here is the white group at work:

Here's the blue group with their coffee filter:

 The result:  The coffee filter worked better than our stone, sand and cotton wool filter.
We felt that this is because the stones we used might have been dirty themselves and so added to the dirt instead of filtering it away, and using sand was a bad idea because it ended up dripping into the bottle along with the dirty water.  We decided that if we use filters again we will only use cotton wool.  We think that a cotton wool filter might be great for cleaning water.
We learned lots about soil today, and we showed off our new-found knowledge when another 2nd class came to visit us and hear about our findings.