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.

Worms and caterpillars in our apples!

We love eating apples.

They are good for us and keep us healthy.

Not these apples though.

These ones have worms or caterpillars in them.
Yuck!

Bigger caterpillars

Remember the caterpillars that arrived exactly two weeks ago.

Look at how big they have become.

What does a plant need? Two weeks on

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!

Beach safari next Thursday

Clay bugs

Musical trains

We had fun clapping along with chugga and chooo

to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle.

Some of us are very good at getting the patterns right.

How does our garden grow?

Here's how:

 Little apples

 Huge potatoes and cabbages!

 Onions and Tansy

 Peas and carrots

New notices

Sarah Gundy, project officer at NUIG's Network of Excellence for Functional Biomaterials, with pupils Yeshuah O'Brien-Bayer, Eve Smyth and Patrick Bilanga at Scoil Chaitríona Junior school in Renmore during a visit from the prestigious Discover Primary Science and Maths Excellence Squad to celebrate their involvement in the DPSM Awards of Science and Maths Excellence.

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!