Ms. McLoughlin's class, 2nd Class, Room 9: May 2016

Monday, 30 May 2016

The Pro12 Rugby Cup comes to our school

Tim Allnutt brings the Connacht Rugby Pro12 Cup to our school

Sports Day 2016

Thursday, 26 May 2016

Investigations with hot air and floating balls

Today we were talking about air.
We know that air from a hairdryer is usually warm.
We wondered if the air comes out of the hairdryer and goes straight up, or whether the air goes sideways too.
We tested this by putting our hands on top of the air stream (we could feel the warm air) and then to the sides of the air stream (where we couldn't feel any warm air).
Based on this we decided that warm air travels straight out of the hairdryer.

Teacher had some balls.

The polystyrene ball is filled with polystyrene and is very light.

The ping pong ball is hollow (but filled with air) and is very light.

The bouncy ball is filled with rubber and is heavier.

The marble is glass throughout and is heavy.

We wondered would any or all of these float on the air from the hairdryer?

We ordered them in various combinations of which we thought would float best?

We also discussed how they might float.....straight up and stay there....straight up and then bounce up and down in the air......straight up but then be knocked out of the air stream.....not float at all.

We discussed what difference we thought size and weight would have on each ball.

Then the fun part.....

The testing:

Then, using a toilet roll and then a kitchen roll insert (along with 2 ping pong balls and a bouncy ball), we tested how many balls would float if we put them in in different orders.

This was really fun.

Go on, ask us what we discovered and why?

More investigations with capacity

Today we did a lot of work measuring with litres, half litres and quarter litres.

We have some measuring to do for homework too.

This is really fun work!

Interesting visitor

There was an interesting visitor around the school today.

Teacher spotted him on the corridor and he came into class.

We had to use our imaginations and investigative skills to figure out what his interesting piece of equipment was used for. Can you guess?

We finally found out that it was an alarm tester. The tester is filled with a can of vapour smoke which causes the smoke alarms to react. The alarm didn't go off though because the bells were turned off during testing. Thanks Paul for showing us how smoke alarms are tested!