Category: STEM

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Scottish Water

On 2nd of September 2024 the Scottish water came to our school and two of them were dressed as a tap and a toilet! They were talking about how they were doing a bunch of roadworks in Port Ellen because the pipes were getting old and rusty which would have meant we would have gotten rusty and dirty water. 

 Some pipes were bursting around Islay and Jura. They showed us the new plastic pipes that they were putting in. They told us the 3 Ps to put in the toilet; pee, poop, paper!  

They came in to show us what they have been doing around our village. They set us a mission called H2O and it basically is we got a card, so we must fill it in and at the end of the week we show our class what we have done to save our water. 

They told us about the water cycle and in the summer whem its really hot we start running out of water so that’s why we need to save as much water as we can. 

At the end we got to stay and try on the uniform, tap and toilet outfit so we could take pictures. Altogether, it was really fun and the whole school had a blast! So, save your water everyone because it is not unlimited. 

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Stem Day At High School

On Thursday 29th August we went to Islay High School for a STEM day. There  was workshops about different stuff. The opening speech was a lady from a stem company encouraging STEM for young people. The next speech was a worker from the SSE that was talking about the SSE. Then there was an SSE graduate that moved from the Philippines talk about his time in the SSE.  The first workshop we went to was a coding workshop. The little bright lights on the bots were glistening like a stars in the middle of space. The main thing about this workshop: Coding spheros. We got to make spheros weave in and out of cones and do challenges with it. The next station was outside in a polytunnel.  It was about bees and other animals. We got to make paper Mache balls. During lunch we asked to get raffle tickets. and the final workshop was about birds. We went to see birds outside with binoculars. We didn’t see much birds. nor variety. But we had a great time!

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P6/7 Microorganisms Topic

In the first term of 2024 primary 6/7 started a topic on Microorganisms. Their aim was to understand different types of Microorganisms and how they helped and harmed the world.

One part of their project was researching different Microorganisms and making posters about them. The things they needed to have on their posters were an explanation of Microorganisms, a list of helpful and harmful Microorganisms, a fact file about two different Microorganisms, and fun facts. Almost all of the children were successful in this and some even had to use two sheets of A3 paper!

Another part of the project was  looking at things through microscopes, the class looked at a lot of different things through microscopes like worms, moss and sand. They were fascinated by this and spent a long time looking at different things.

They did two small mold experiments, one where they did different things to two slices of bread to see which grew more mold. They also got a variety of different food, some that was processed a lot and some that was not processed much, and out them all in an airtight box to see what grew the most mold.

In conclusion this was a great project and the class enjoyed it a lot.

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ELECTRONICAL ENGINEERING

What is Endeavour? 

Endeavour is a thing when every year 5/6/7 learn about whatever they want, and my Endeavour is electronical engineering. Every afternoon we endeavor. 

What is electronical engineering?

It is when you have a soldering iron and their is a thing called a resistor if you solder a resister into the mother board you would put it into R1/ R2 or R3.   You solder wires to connect resistors, battery leads, LEDs and capacitors to make a circuit that does something.  I have made lights and a steady hand game.

 

 

 

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Science Week

SCIENCE WEEK

In science week  we made torches and electricity circuits. Our parents came into school and we showed them how to solder a torch and how to make some circuits. We made torches to represent light for the city of ember. We also showed our parents what we made in the city of Ember and the lights were as bright as car head lights. We did it because we do science stuff like make light bulbs work and make mini windmills. We also made fans and torches to take home.

 

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Stickman Wood Adventure!

What an amazing adventure P1,2 had today with our new friends from Bowmore Primary! We had a day filled with stickman activities from raft building to mapping. We loved our packed lunches and were very excited to see what treats we had inside them. We made s’mores and played on the swings. Only a few of us fell asleep on the bus home until we saw a helicopter carrying an electricity pole! Well done team, you were fabulous!

 

 

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Robotics with St Andrews University

 

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Weather in P4

This morning, we put out our rain gauges and answered our question from yesterday’s learning – why do we need to measure rainfall? We found out you need to measure rainfall to find out if the climate is changing and when to plant things.  We then began to look at air pressure and cloud formation.

 

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STEM in P1,2

P1,2 had a great morning doing all things STEM in class, lots of investigation and science fun!

 

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Kappla Towers with our Buddies

⭐️ We had great fun today with the Kapla blocks, the big boys and girls from Primary 3 let us borrow their huge box of blocks and even came down to show us how to build the biggest tower with them! ⭐️

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Harry Potter Escape Room

Primary 3 and 4 from Port Ellen met with Primary 4 and 5 in Bowmore to do a Harry potter Maths themed escape room.  There was lots of problem solving to do, including sorting the potions and spells.  It was great to meet with our friends in Bowmore to do some maths.

 

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Christmas Cupcake Challenge

Last week P567 made Christmas Cupcakes for a competition in school.  There were 4 groups and they had to design a cupcake for each group.  They then had to make and bake the cupcakes and then they needed to ice the finished cakes.

One group made 24 mint swirl cupcakes, one made 24 chocolate orange unicorn cupcakes, one made 24 penguin Oreo cupcakes and the last made Christmas Tree candy floss cupcakes.

We had to measure the correct amounts using our maths skills and we also had to calculate how much profit we would make if we sold them.  We then got to take them home for our parents.  It was really fun.

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Christmas Fun in ELCC

We love painting and enjoyed painting a branch outside in the garden this morning, we want to make an outside Christmas tree 🎄. We had lots of discussion about ice and how cold it was in the nursery garden. We decided to make our own ice and added some bits of nature from the garden. Our freezer in the nursery was to small so we went and asked Mrs Holyoke if we could use her freezer!

We also went on a hunt round the village to find the Christmas numbers to 6! Fred knew that number 3 was at the Ramsey and Nola knew that number 5 was at Campbells 🎄 ⭐️ we are learning to notice numbers in our environments and all around us. 👣 We have loved looking at all the house numbers and in the windows, we hope everyone doesn’t mind.

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ELCC Worm World

Jimmy’s mum gave us a worm world so we filled it up today with soil and put 5 worms inside from our garden wormery 🪱🪱 We talked about what the worms would do in our worm home and what they could eat 🍃 We will keep an eye on them and keep them in nursery this week then let them go back in to our womery 😄 ⭐️ We are learning about worms and the important job that they do. 👣 Continue to watch our worms and feed them.

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Rock pooling

On Wednesday 7th of September p5/6/7 went rock pooling over the Ard to the  Swan’s pool for our classification topic.

We caught sea creatures; so we caught multiple crabs, a jelly fish,  some shrimp, fish, and a huge fish skeleton.

After that we got seaweeds and the animals we found and identified them using classification keys because we kept them in trays with water in them. The multiple seaweeds were all different colours, shapes and sizes.

After we let them go and walked back over the Ard and went back to school.

By William and Jacob

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SUNFLOWERS AND CATERPILLARS IN P12

 

We were very excited to receive some classroom pets this term! We have ten tiny wriggly caterpillars we are watching metamorphosis into beautiful butterflies. We’re very much looking forward to watching this process.

We were very excited to see how much our caterpillars had grown after a few days, they’re huge! We’re wondering how long it will be until they go into cocoons? Some of us were also delighted to see that our sunflowers have started to grow! We’ve added another page into our diaries to track their progress. Laurie’s is 4 cm tall already!

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Flying Kites in ELCC

We had a lovely morning in the sunshine this morning. We had our snack at the park then headed down the front beach to measure the wind speed with our new anemometer to see how windy it was to fly our kite.🪁 ⭐️.  We really enjoyed using the anemometer and flying the kite, it was a bit trickier than up on our school hill.  We will be looking at getting a weather station and learning more about the weather.

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Bee Learning in P12

As part of our biodiversity topic we have been learning all about bees in P12.  Bees are very important to keep our world healthy as they pollinate all the plants we eat.  Fiona from the Islay Natural History Trust came in and told us all about bees and how they live and make honey.  We also had a visit from Jacob in primary 5 who is doing Beekeeping for his Endeavour topic and showed us his Bee suit and model hive he made with his Papa.  We now know lots about bees!

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Port An Eas Distillery

In school we made a distillery and a company for whisky.  Our group was called Port An Eas.  We made the distilleries in groups of five people and our group had Evie, Hugh, Connor, Iona and Calin . Everyone in the group had a different role in our Distillery: Evie is milling and mashing, Hugh is casks and ageing Connor is distillation, Iona is malting and peat and Callin is fermentation.

To make our whisky drinks we had lots of whisky smells and we had to pick the three smells that we liked best.  Together we chose rose, caramel and coconut. A few Days later we made teas that replicated the smells that we chose with different flavours of tea.  You can make it with 4tsp of black cat caramel tea, 3tsp of rose black tea ,1 pukka relax tea bag and 6 leaves of stevia.

We made are distillery with card and some modelling card to make it stand up because it is a circle it couldn’t stand up on its on own so we cut up strips of card to hold it up.

 

 

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Our Loch Lili Distillery

Our Loch Lili distillery is near a loch and it is located there because it is near water. Our distillery’s special features are we grow our barley on the roof and we have  a windmill outside.  It is located there because it is near a ferry so we would have  some tourists around. But the negatives are too many tourists about  and that could be a problem. We made a model distillery and this is a picture.

 

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Our Glenastle Distillery

In school we have been making distillery’s.  My distillery group was called Glenastle.  The different jobs are; manager which is William; casks and ageing which is Jack; Jacob is the still man and Teddy is the malting and peat. Our distillery  its sited on Glenastle because there is 2 locks for water and the bottle is like a triangle shape so it can be packaged easy. The disadvantages is the roads  are dirt tracks and the ground is not level so you have to level it or the distillery will be squint.  We designed our own drinks and made the distilleries as models.  We will be presenting to parents so they can see what we have learned.

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Bottle Rockets

Last week students from the University of Exeter Engineering department came to our school and made bottle rockets with us. We had to design and make the fins and decorations on our rockets so they would fly straight. We went outside to launch them. They launched ours and it went flying and almost went in the field.   The one that went the furthest had a lego figure attached called Dave!  Thanks Exeter University for coming and visiting us.

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Herbal Teas

We have been learning about healthy eating and our senses.  After planting our herbs in the garden we decided to make some herbal teas. We had to use our senses to describe what we could smell and we even had a go at tasting the teas. Some people thought some of the teas tasted nice and some tasted yucky !

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P12 Distilleries Presentation

Yesterday afternoon we presented our distilleries to our class. We needed to think about how we built our model, ensure we spoke clearly and used as much distillery language as possible and could answer questions from our friends. We gave each other feedback on our designs using 2 stars and a wish.

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Biodiversity IDL

This morning P12 started our new IDL topic of biodiversity. We joined lots of schools across the UK to meet with Keeping Scotland Beautiful, The National Book Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. We found out about the importance of food chains and how all species rely on each other, we got to meet the endangered Pine Hoverflys and Wolves at The Highland Wildlife Park and meet with author Gill Lewis to talk about some of her books which are about how humans and animals can work together to make a difference.

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Barley Germination P12

Last week P12 had the challenge of trying to get barley to germinate. Some of us decided we should put our barley outside (picture 1) this had two different outcomes. The barley which were left under/beside the train disappeared! We think some visitors ate it….. The barley that was protected by the creel was very wet but did begin to germinate slightly. The barley that was in the fridge (picture 2) went mouldy although it did begin to germinate too which Mrs Hannett was surprised at! The barley which was left in the classroom by the window and kept damp germinated beautifully and we will attempt to plant this tomorrow. Fingers crossed the deer don’t get it!

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