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.
This week is Africa week. We went to the hall to see Ms. Tierney's Junior lnfant class show us a play about a day in the life of Uganda. It was so interesting. We even got to see some Ugandan dolls made from banana fibres and a ball, also made from banana fibres. 
In our class we are doing lots of things relating to Africa - we are painting masks, colouring an African village scene, hearing African stories and learning about some African countries. We also watched a really interesting video called Kirikou, about a small child in Africa.
The Volvo Ocean Race is set to arrive in Galway this weekend. We are so excited. We are following it on the internet, and seeing the sailors at sea. We even saw teddy steering a yacht. We painted our own Green Dragon yachts in class. We hope that the Green Dragon does very well in the race.
They are fun to play, and we are learning lots when we play with them.
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.
Mrs. Newell's class came to help us with our art today. We made pictures from oil and water. We dropped a couple of drops of oil on top of a tray of water. Then we laid our white pages on top. Look at the lovely designs that we made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is called "capacity". We had fun today measuring how many cups of water were in different containers. We had lots of chances to guess before we did the measuring.
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.
We are making ladybirds in class, to keep our (real) worms and caterpillars company. Teacher had some plastic easter egg shells which she kept so we could cover in papier mache layers and then paint as ladybirds. Papier mache uses a paste made out of flour and water and layers of newspapers. It is messy but great fun to work with.
We know lots about bugs, mini-beasts and insects. We coloured lots of bugs, and used cut up pieces of blue and green paper for ponds and grass. Look at the lovely collages we made using the insects we coloured.