Feathery Fun

Look at something interesting found at home. We have lots of questions? Where did these bird feathers come from? Was a bird in the house? What kind of bird has feathers like this? So interesting!

Making Boats

We are watching the Volvo Ocean Race on the computer (and whiteboard). We are cheering for Green Dragon and we can't wait to see the Green Dragon in Galway next week. Today we made our own boats out of marla. It was quite a challenge getting them to float. Our lumps of marla wouldn't float without being changed into a boat shape.When one of the girls figured out a great design for her boat, she showed us all how to make floating boats. Next teacher got some passengers (peas) that were willing to ride in our boats. All the pieces of marla were exactly the same size so we looked for good floating designs. Some of our boats held 21, 22 or even 42 peas! (which beats teacher's previous record of 16 passengers). Now we know more about good shapes for floating.

Caterpillars, Cocoons and Butterflies

Don't forget to keep up to date on the progress of our painted lady caterpillars on http://scoilchaitrionajnrmsmcloughlin.blogspot.com/2009/04/caterpillars-and-butterflies.html

Lifecycles

We know lots about lifecycles. We can tell you lots about the lifecycle of the frog, the butterfly, the hen, and plants. We have toys and charts we use to show others all about the lifecycles.

Water Investigations

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Today we learned more about water. We tried some investigations. They were very interesting. We know that when water is poured it always falls straight down to the ground. We can get it to fall diagonally by getting it to run along a piece of string. The water holds on to the string using surface tension.
Next we tried some bath tricks. If you have a bottle full of water, and you turn it upside down, all the water will run out. If you turn the same bottle of water upside down, but you do this under water, the water will not run out. This is because the water in the bottle is trying to get out, but air pressure is trying to force water in the basin to go into the bottle. Neither the water in the basin nor the water in the bottle end up moving at all. We can see air pressure at work even more clearly when we get a cup filled with water, turn it upside down on cardboard, and let go. We all expected the cardboard to fall down and the water in the cup to run out, but this didn't happen because the air pressure on the cardboard prevented the cardboard from moving.
Surface Tension and Detergent: This is a great investigation you can try in the bath at home. Fill the bath with water. Make a cardboard boat and float it on the water. It will not move if the water is still. Now drop one drop of wash up liquid (or shampoo) into the water at the back of the boat. This causes the surface tension on the water to be broken and the boat will shoot forward. Be warned though: This works only once, until the bath is washed and dried again, getting rid of any detergent.
Water Races: We tried to figure out the fastest way to empty a bottle. We tried racing bottles, we tried pouring, squeezing and shaking a bottle, while racing it against a control bottle. None of these ways got the water out of the bottle more quickly than others. What we discovered is that you need to swirl a bottle of water to get the water to pour out more quickly. When you swirl a bottle, the water runs to the outside of the bottle, allowing air to push up inside the bottle. This air pushes down on the water, pushing it quickly out of the bottle.

Big Plants

Some of the seeds we planted have really grown. Look at our wonderful broad bean and four leaf clover plants. We are so proud of them.

Floating and Sinking

Some things float and some things sink. Today we tried out various things to see whether they would float or sink. Each time we had to guess first whether something would float or sink, then we could try it out. We had some surprises - things either floated or sank when we didn't expect them to.

Mathematical Bugs

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 We had a great maths lesson on sorting, using our collection of bugs. We sorted the bugs into lots of different groups according to
type of bug
colour of bug
good or bad bugs
live in Ireland or not
whether they are plain or multicoloured
whether they are insects or not
whether they can fly or not It was a great chance to talk about bugs, and to practice our sorting, all at the same time.

Senses - Touch

Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Today we tried using our sense of touch. Teacher had a feeley bag, into which she put one of these items: a rubber, carpet, cardboard, sandpaper, wood, a balloon, sponge, cling film plastic and fabric. The class got to ask questions about whether the object is rough/smooth, hard/soft, warm/cold, where we could find the object and what the object could be used for. The child holding the feeley bag answered the questions and gave hints if it was too hard to guess. It is hard to guess objects using only our sense of touch.

How well can we tell smells

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Today teacher challenged us with a smelling test. Yes, it was a smelling test and not a spelling test! She had three containers. We had to smell each and tell teacher what we thought was in each. Here are the results:Of the 21 children in our class, 8 correctly guessed one smell (not the same smell was guessed by each child though). No one correctly guessed either two or three of the substances though.
In container 1 there was vinegar. (6 correct guesses). Some of the incorrect guesses were: sour, oil, lemon.
In container 2 there was vanilla essence. (No one guessed this). Some incorrect guesses were: medicine, chocolate, coke, juice, coffee, syrup.
In container 3 there was lemon wash-up liquid (2guessed correctly). Some incorrect guesses were: pear, oil, fizzy orange, juice, soap, orange juice, vinegar, perfume.It's amazing how hard it is to correctly identify smells that are so familiar if you can't see its original container!

Kite Flying

Monday, April 27th, 2009
We spent lots of time today and on Friday making kites. First we had a look at some kites from around the world, then we made our own. We each got a big piece of white paper and folded it into triangles and rectangles. We cut off the unwanted rectangles with our scissors. Next we folded our triangle in half again, making a smaller triangle. When we opened this out we had a fabulous diamond!Designing and painting came next. That was an interesting job. Before this all the kites looked identical, but now each kite was unique. Tails had to be made too.

Teacher gave each of us a plastic strip and we used the spare rectangle pieces to make triangle shaped bows for the tail.Since the weather was nice, we did the constructing outside. We used bamboo skewers, string and sticky tape to finish off the kites.

They looked great.

Now for the testing.

The weather was perfect - sunny but windy, so we headed to the field next to the school for the flight trials. The kites needed a good run to get them flying. Some of them flew so well. Unfortunately not all of them survived so well - some needed repairs. Making kites is a wonderful experience. Why not try it out for yourself?