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!

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!

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!

Here is our close-up photo game – click on the link and have a go yourself. (Absolutely no peeking at the answers before you study the photos!)

CLOSE UPS

Here are the answers – can you match them to each picture?

apple                                cornflake                         

lipstick                            orange                           

ball-point pen             spaghetti (dried)         

sugar crystal                 fingerprint                   

  tea bag                          edge of book pages      

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.

Prospective astronauts from Year 4 enjoyed a fantastic evening at Space Camp. Rain stopped us from stargazing but we made planispheres and constellation cards to help us find the stars whenever we want. The trainees also went through testing to analyse their communication and memory skills as well as measuring their pulse rates before and after exercise. 

After hot chocolate we then settled down to camp “out” in the hall in our tents. Everyone had a brilliant time and passed with flying colours.

Nursery enjoyed discovering that at the top of Jasper’s beanstalk was outer space. An alien egg was found having landed in Nursery. Maybe it fell from our beanstalk? We did mark making in our rockets, made fluffy and fizzy paint which we used to create planets and painted aliens. We also explored how we could package alien eggs to work out how the egg  landed safely.

On Friday, we had such an awesome day! We designed our own very own crater experiment using flour and cocoa powder. It got a little messy! 

In year 6, we also paid tribute to the brilliant Stephen Hawking and learnt about his contributions to the world of science. 

Year 2 were challenged to build landers that would protect their space probe (an egg) and safely deliver it to Mars’ surface. The teams all had the same materials and they came up with a fantastic range of ideas from parachutes to gliders, protective baskets to on-board crash mats. A few probes sadly went splat (well, we thought that was quite funny, actually) and a few sustained a few cracks but most successfully landed. Everyone worked fantastically with their team to try to achieve the objective and did an amazing job.

This year we zoomed off to outer space and took a wet and wild walk amongst the planets of the solar system.  It made us realise why some planets are hot and some are extremely cold and we found out that on our favourite planet, Neptune, it might rain diamonds!

In our story this week the dinosaurs visited the moon to play a game of football and laid some eggs in the rocket on the way home.  Our challenge was to find the best way to package these eggs so that they survived the voyage back to Earth.  We tested a number of packaging materials (bubble wrap, flour, popcorn, water, tissue paper and cotton wool balls).  The eggs were packed up and dropped.  The best packaging materials were popcorn, flour and bubble wrap.  However, whether the egg always survived the drop in these materials depended on how well the children had wrapped up the egg!  Did your egg smash?