Even though we are on holidays from school, we have been keeping a close eye on the buds. Some of the ash buds are out now. These are pictures from the Ash tree in Ms. McLoughlin's garden. How are the buds on the Ash trees near you?April 15th. 
The buds have got much bigger now.
Have a look at the lovely printed sheep we made. Can you guess what we used to print the sheep, the heads, the eyes, the grass, the legs and the flowers?
We found wood lice, slugs, worms, flies, ants, centipedes and millipedes. We picked some up and put them in our bug viewers so we could examine how many legs they had. Others we just watched, as they went about their buggy business. We know that insects have only 6 legs, so we were trying to find as many different insects as we could. We realised that: with 14 legs, wood lice are not insects. Neither are spiders with 8 legs (arachnids actually) or slugs, snails, or worms, all with no legs at all. Naturally, centipedes and millipedes have far too many legs.
Thank goodness for flies and ants. We looked closely at the mural on the wall and saw how many mini-beasts we could name. Some of us used to be a bit scared around small bugs, but now we can see what interesting creatures they are. We will help look after them if they ever need our help!
We have a little plastic submarine in our classroom. We tried filling it with baking powder and then submerging it in a basin of water. We hoped the baking powder would react with the water and make bubbles of carbon dioxide that would float the submarine. This didn't happen. We could see the bubbles of air popping slowly out the top of the submarine but the submarine stayed stubbornly on the bottom of the basin. We tried again, this time with less baking powder, but that didn't work either. We'll go on trying until we discover the right combination!
Not satisfied that this was the perfect volcano, we tried other combinations of powders and liquids.
We also tried adding water to baking powder - this fizzed a little, but not enough to push the foam it made out the top of the volcano. 
I wonder what would happen if we tried adding a fizzy drink to icecream? We must try this some day.
He has been coming to our class to tell us all about business, money and jobs. That might sound very confusing, but he is reading us very interesting stories and helping us to do fun worksheets. We will miss him next week now that he is finished. He is very nice and we had fun learning lots of things from him.
It's lovely to see them grow so big. It was a very messy job but we cleaned up really well after ourselves.
May 11th: Look at the broad bean plant now. It has lovely white and purple flowers.
It gave us a good chance to paint and construct. 
In Ms. Long's class a dad called Martin came to teach sign language. We got to join Ms. Long's class and we learned how to communicate using sign language. We can now say Hello, Thank you, Good afternoon, Yes, No, Nice to meet you and many other things. We can't wait to practise all these new words. We hope they can be of great use to us for talking to lots more people.
We had magnet stations - 5 different tables doing 5 different things. We got a chance to try the different stations.
At the next station we had red and blue magnets that had North and South on them. We had to guess, then try, what happens when you put North and South together (they attract each other). Then we tried North with North and South with South (they repel). We tried this on dowel rods with purple and yelllow magnets too. 
At the third station we had to guess, then test, what a magnet will work through. We found that magnets work through pencil cases, clothes, tables, chairs, books, paper, baskets and lots more. We recorded our results on a big sheet of paper. 
At the fourth station we made our own magnets with steel nails. The nails were not magnetic at the start (and if they were, we dropped them on the floor so they lost their magnetism). We magnetised each one by rubbing a magnet off the nail. We then tested to see whether it was magnetic by picking up a paper clip with the nail. This worked really well. 
At the last station we made magnetic car racing tracks. We drew racing tracks and put a magnet underneath each one, and a paper clip on top. We got our cars (paper clips) to run along the track by moving the magnet underneath.
Such a lot of cool things you can do with magnets!!!
Friday, March 20th: We have a Horse Chestnut tree beside our school. We are watching it closely. The Horse Chestnut buds are just about to bloom. We can already see the leaves inside the sticky buds.
Monday, March 23rd: Our buds are out and the tree looks very much alive.
Thursday, April 2nd: The leaves are looking really green now.
We saw houses that are detached, semi-detached, and terraced. We even saw a thatched house.
There is a huge variety of houses in Renmore. Here are some of the houses we saw. Can you figure out which is which?
At the beach Seán (our Junior Achievement guest) read us a lovely story, then we went digging for treasures, finding all sort of marine life and playing in the sand. 
On our way back we took a look at the old pump and the tunnel under the railway.
