Month: March 2019

Mother’s Day Treat

On Friday the children invited their mummies and other family members into school for a special treat of scones and lemonade.  Everyone had a fabulous afternoon enjoying the sunshine, crafting ‘love bugs’ and being pampered in our beauty salon!

 

 

 

The Odd Egg

This week the children have amazed us with their writing, describing the odd egg that duck adopted.  

It’s Minpin week on the Great British Sewing Bee!

We are in the midst of designing and making tiny outfits for our Minpin people – we are using lots of fine motor DT skills such as sewing, cutting & pinning.  We are using  wooden dolly pegs as our models. Hopefully, next week we will use our Minpins to act out scenes from the story.

Paleontologists at work!

3HC spent the morning carefully extracting fossils from rocks. We had to take lots of care not to damage the fossil as we scraped, chiselled and swept the rock away to reveal what was inside. Afterwards, we found out about the life of famous fossil hunter Mary Anning and how she discovered previously unknown, fossilised sea creatures.

Sense of Science

In Reception we have been using our senses to explore our environment. The children were challenged to identify food items only using their sense of smell.   We also investigated how the colour of food influences this.  All the children correctly identified the mint oil in the green chia seed slime.  However, they though the red slime smelt of strawberries until they closed their eyes.  When we closed our eyes we realised it was actually orange!  Our favourite part was exploring the texture of the slime;  “it’s cold and slimy”, “lumpy”, “it’s hard and soft!”.  If the slime was hit it felt solid but when you tried to pick it up it ran through your fingers.  

Our eyes were useful in the prism investigation centre.  The children discovered how different things looked when observed through a prism and when placed on patterned paper it was magical how the patterns changed. We even discovered how to create a rainbow!  

We used our ears to identify the different animal noises on a CD and our sense of touch to identify items associated with them.  What an amazing day!

 

 

Stone Age to Iron Age Workshop

Year 3 had a fantastic day today at their Stone Age to Iron Age workshop with their Neanderthal teacher. They learnt about the developments from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, and how people’s daily lives changed with the development from using stone, to bronze, to iron. 

They were able to be deer and woolly mammoth hunters; they held real woolly mammoth bones; they learnt about communication within tribes; they looked at different types of settlements; they handled and drew Stone Age fossils and rocks; and they even built their own Stonehenge!

A brilliant time was had by all!

 

 

Going Batty!

We enjoyed a fantastic science sleepover learning all about bats thanks to Worcestershire Bat Trust – we had an awful lot of questions about these amazing animals. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any bats on our walk through the woods in the dark (we did hear some owls though) but we hope WBT will come back in the summer for another night walk. We’ll certainly be looking at bats some more when we come to our habitats topic later in the year. 

Thank you to all the staff who looked after us!

Senses Trickery

Year 2 have been exploring a whole range of senses as part of our Science Festival, and not just the usual five we think of.

We explored how the smell and colour of food affects what we think it tastes like (yes, the green, orange and dark red drinks were ALL just lemonade) as well as how our sense of touch can tell different textures apart.

We also investigated vision, including colour blindness, how other animals see the world and playing a game of blind football with a special ball containing bells. We then took this further by exploring how bats use echolocation to find their food. 2MG also tried out a vision test called the Stroop test which made us laugh – we kept reading out the words instead of saying the colour they were written in: “red… green… yellow… horse!”

We also learnt about a sense called proprioception. That’s the sense that lets you know the position of your body – try putting your finger to your nose with your eyes closed. Sensors in your muscles and joints send information back to your brain. However, we discovered that it can be tricked by our other senses. We even fooled our brains into thinking we had an extra hand!

 

Science Week

To celebrate British Science Week we have been busy carrying out investigations each day. We have been designing clothing for cosmic and gem to wear in the dark, we’ve built tunnels for them to travel underground and designed our own dinosaurs. In order to achieve the Early years explorer award we had to take part in at least 4 investigations and we are please to say that have achieved it and each child received a special certificate. 

Spring walk and visit to the pond

Now that spring has officially began we went on a walk to see if we could spot any of the signs. We spotted buds on plants and trees, the weather felt warmer and the birds were tweeting happily. We also visited the pond, where the frogs have laid their eggs.  We got to see what frogspawn really looks like and we are all very excited to see the next stage in the cycle; tadpoles!