Our newest cocoon

Confused about the difference between moths and butterflies? cocoons, chrysalis and pupa?

Try out this site http://www.bugs.org/bugquiz/answers/butterfly_moth.shtml

Hope this helps.

Merry Christmas!

Carol Service

 We had our carol service last night in the church.  It was a fabulous event, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the carols and the readings.

Congratulations to all our carolers. You were fantastic! 

Paper tree decorations

Look at the fabulous paper decorations we made in class.  We got some help:- from our class artist, Calin, who regularly shows us how to make some lovely crafts.

Fingerprints and measures

A chef and some engineers

We ate some really delicious christmas cookies.

They were made especially for us by a fantastic chef!

We are getting really good with the dominoes now!

Pop Top and Bug Spray

Teacher's new caterpillar

 Monday, December 19th, 2011

Teacher found a very green caterpillar outside on the frosty step.  She has rescued it, and we will look after it in school and give it nice leaves to eat and water to drink.  Hopefully it will turn into a healthy moth (or butterfly).

Forces with a hair dryer

Forces Experiments

Gravity and Air

Teacher had a hair dryer and some balls of different weights and sizes.

After chatting about what the balls were made of, and what the balls are filled with, we put the balls in order, starting with the heaviest and finishing with the lightest.

The bouncy rubber ball was heaviest, the ping pong ball was next and the polystyrene ball was the lightest.

Next, we watched what happens when we let go of a ball:- each one falls to the ground because gravity is acting on it.

We took out the hairdryer, and guessed first what would happen if we put each ball into the slipstream and let the force (air) act on it.

We got so good at this that we could even manage to balance two balls in the slipstream.

A rubber bouncy ball does not float at all!

A little polystyrene ball will float up in the air stream, but is not heavy enough, or have a strong enough gravitational force to stay in the slipstream.  It just bounces away, every time.

So, what happens if we use a cardboard cylinder (a toilet roll or a kitchen roll) to make sure all the air travels upwards and not to the side.

The ping pong ball is pushed up much higher.

Painting the clay decorations

Christmas data chart

Friday, 16th December 2011

Today we chatted about our favourite Christmas things.

Of course we all love Santa and Christmas presents, but these weren't choices for us.

Look at what we chose:

We counted and compared the groups, saw which had most and least, saw "how many more" or "how many less" there were in some groups as compared with others.

We learned lots of maths from this activity.

Another wonderful nativity play

Well done to Ms. Conneely's class for such a fantastic play today.  The songs were so catchy that we just had to sing along.  We were all really impressed by such wonderful actors and actresses in this class.

Junior Achievement finale

We had our final lesson with Josh.  We have very much enjoyed our lessons on Junior Achievement with him.  We had a great time.

Working with sticklebricks and clay

The story of the First Christmas Tree

Teacher told us the story of the first Christmas tree.

It happened when a man from Germany got lost in a forest late one winter's night.

He lit some candles and put them on a tree to keep him from feeling lonely and frightened.

At drama time, the man from the forest came to visit us, and we were able to ask him lots of questions about his frightening experience, and about what the forest was like on the cold dark winter's night.

We also heard how he chose the perfect Christmas tree.

We really enjoyed this story.  We will remember it whenever we look at our own Christmas trees.

Nativity plays

Junior Spider awards

The story of 7

Printing trees and The Gruffalo

Christmas cribs

More engineering skills

Look at the great railway track we constructed this morning.  We are very proud of it!

Experiments on Sound

Different notes according to the size of the elastic band!

Playing our straw whistles.

Look what happens when a sound vibrates.  It makes the air around it vibrate.  Then when these vibrations hit the ear, our brains turn the vibrations into noise, and that is what we hear.
In space, where there is no air, it is very quiet.  That is because there is no air to vibrare near the sound, and so the vibrations don't reach the astronauts' ears, so no sound is heard.

More work on the numberline

After jumping along the numberline yesterday, we moved on to using a smaller numberline and jumping along it with our fingers.  It is a really easy way of figuring out difficult puzzles, like what do you get if you add 3 and 5!

Addition: Jumping on the number line

We are learning to add two numbers together by jumping on the number line.
We have a hopscotch number line in our classroom.  Teacher asks us a question (like 3+4), we have to figure out the answer in our head, then jump along the number line to see if we have got the right answer.
This is a lot of fun, and we get the answer right almost every time.

Our Santa Masks are finished

Guessing time

Saving Energy