Floating and Sinking

We collected an item from around the class and each of us made a guess as to whether it would float or sink. We were surprised with some of the items! Then we had a go at making our own floating vessel, it was musch trickier than we thought.

We made predictions about what would happen when we put vinegar on top of bicarbonate of soda. Some of us got it right.  We decided to make our own volcano out of plasticine. We chose plasticine because it is waterproof.  The volcano was put into a bowl to make sure it didn't make a mess and the bicarbonate was put in first followed by the vinegar.  We were amazed at how much the volcano erupted.  The smell was terrible but we had a lot of fun.

Float or sink?

We made guesses as to which items we thought would float or sink.  We wrote down our answers and tested them out.  We were very surprised at some of the items.  Afterwards we had plasticine to make our own floating vessel. It was very tricky but we had fun.

Can we hear as well as a dog?

We tested our hearing to see if we could hear as well as a dog.  We wore a blindfold and used only our hearing to find the person making the noise. We enjoyed finding where the noise came from and found out that dogs can hear sounds before we can and that's why we have them as guard dogs.

(photos to follow)

Our Metal Detectors

Following on from our electricity experiments, we used the knowledge that we learned about circuits to build our own metal detectors.  We created a circuit with a button cell battery,  3 wires and a LED bulb.  Once we buillt our circuit we put it inside a plasticine alien we made.  We added foil for hands and tested it.  If we touched anything metal the aliens nose lit up.  We had a few problems along the way with the connections staying together but we got there in the end.

Autumn Term September 2014

Electricity

We have been investigating electricity.  We talked about things in our homes that use electricity and how we can make a bulb light up.  We used a battery as the power and connected it to a bulb using wires. On the end of the wires are crocodile clips (they look like a crocodiles teeth!)  We tried all sorts of ways to make the bulb light up but we soon realised we needed to make a circuit.  Hey Presto we have a lit bulb! We then tried to power a buzzer, it sounded very funny and tickled our finger tips when we touched it.  We had lots of fun!

Floating Vessels

We looked at different types of vessels to float on water and made our own out of plasticine.  It was much harder than we thought.