In LB 1 & 2 we had a circus of activities where we had to use our different senses to say what things were. We had feely boxes, played a sounds game, looked at very close-up pictures of everyday objects (this was tricky) and smelled some very pungent smells and had to guess what they were.

The first day of spring sounded like a good excuse to go outside to do some gardening. After weeding and levelling some raised beds, LB1 planted some potatoes in the school’s new garden. We hope to taste our harvest later in the year.

As part of their forces science topic, Year 5 have been exploring density, expansion and why hot air rises. To test our ideas we worked together to build hot air balloons. 

We’ve been learning about melting and freezing by finding out about what ice cream actually is and then making our own in the classroom. Unfortunately, we then had to eat it but we did learn lots along the way including why it is really lucky that water does freeze.

Year 5 have been investigating water resistance by timing how long it took different shapes to fall through water. We found that having a smaller area helped the shaped cut through the liquid but we were quite surprised to learn that the rear of the shape was important too.

Year 6 are currently learning about evolution and this week we’ve been discovering about Darwin’s Finches. We got to pretend to be different birds with different beaks as we raced against the stopwatch to eat various sources of food. We discovered that the “fine tweezer” birds were better adapted to eating small seeds like rice but that the “kitchen tongs” bird was more suited to big seeds such as marbles.

3AS have been building stone circles and finding out how Stone Age people may have used them as calendars. We looked at how shadows changed with the position of the sun and found out about how the sun rises in different places depending on the time of year. In this way, Midsummer and Midwinter could be found.

Year 2 and LB1 have been following the adventures of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle. This week Mr Darwin experienced a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and a tidal wave (all a true story!) before venturing high up into the Andes Mountains where he discovered fossilised seashells. 

We then looked at some fossils, including ammonites, coral and seashells before having a go at trying to work out what a dinosaur may have looked like from just its bones. 2MG also had time to produce some beautiful ammonite watercolour paintings.

We’ve been learning how to read a thermometer this week as we measured the temperature of hot water as it cooled. We then plotted our results on a time graph. Most of us hadn’t used this type of graph before but we soon got the hang of it.

Putting bones together the right way must be hard enough if you know what the animal looks like but it is even trickier when the animal has been extinct for over 66 million years! That didn’t stop 3AS from trying to interpret their bag of bones today. Starting from exactly the same set of fossils, we came up with some different ideas. However, we were not the only ones as we found out about how scientists over the last 150 years have changed their ideas about what an Iguanodon  may have looked like when alive.