Monthly Archives: March 2013

My Day, Month and Year Part 2

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Today we spent more time exploring our mini science topic.

First, we looked again at the phases of the moon. We looked at the website of Woodlands Junior School which has some great information.

We completed our own guide to the different phases of the moon.

Then, we made some models of the moon, earth and sun to help us explain how they move around each other.

After playtime, we started to create our own out of this world pictures.

We used plates and other circle shapes to create planet outlines on black paper, using our soft crayons. Some of the planets had to be just peeking out from the edges.

We were allowed to use any colours we wanted, as we were creating our own special planets.

Next, we splattered white and yellow paint over our picture for stars. Some of them turned into shoooting stars!

Here are some lovely, colourful planets from Carly. I like the tartan one.

Finally, we added our own faces to astronaut cutouts and added them to our picture.

Here is our science display outside our classroom.

Kerpoof animation

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Today we were learning how to make a single frame animation using Kerpoof.

This is a really cool website, which is free to use, and which allows you to do all sorts of creative things.

We were creating animations with a fairytale theme.

Our challenge was to make at least one of the characters move across the screen. We could also add actions and music.

We really enjoyed this and are going to keep practising so we can perhaps make animations with more than one frame.

Have you used any other animation tools online?

Moon exploration

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Today, we explored some facts about the moon, as part of our science topic.

Here is what we thought …

Today we learned:

The light we see from the Moon is actually a refelection of light from the sun.

The moon orbits the earth and during this time it seems to change shape. These are called the phases of the moon.

We were able to watch a video in the Science section of Education City which illustrated this really well.

The moon’s gravitational pull creates the tide in our oceans.

We also learned what causes night and day. We found out that the earth rotates once every 24 hours. When it is facing the sun it is daylight and when it is facing away it is night time.

Do you know any facts about the moon you can share with us?

My Day, Month and Year

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We are studying a new science topic this week.

We are answering some “big questions.” Today our big question was “How do the earth, moon and sun interact?”

First of all we created a Wallwisher/Padlet to record everything we thought we knew about the sun.

We watched this animation from the Children’s University of Manchester which explained the orbit of the moon, earth and sun.

We learned that orbit means to go around something in the same way over and over again.

Here are some new thing we found out:

The sun is 100 times bigger than the earth.

The earth turns around once every 24 hours.
The moon orbits around the earth once every 28 days.
It takes 365 days (and a quarter!) for the earth to go around the sun.
The sun does not move.

This enabled us to answer some of the questions we had put on our Wallwisher.

I wonder what we will find out tomorrow?

Dundee Science Centre

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Today visited Dundee Science Centre.

We were able to take advantage of funding offered by the Scottish Governent to get our bus for free.

It was a windy and snowy afternoon, so we were pleased to be able to leave the classroom and go and learn something new!

Leaving on the bus.

At first, we visited all the exhibits in the centre. We really enjoyed playing inside the giant nose and meeting the robot.

Then we went to a workshop with Craig. Our workshop was called “How to be a Scientist.” We put on some white coats so that we looked like real scientiste and then we got to do some fun experiments.

We had a great time learning new things and would like to say thank you to everyone at the Science Centre.

We would also like to say a big thank you to Mrs Small and Mrs Guthrie for coming along to help us with our trip.

Measurement

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Today we continued some of our work on measurement. We are learning to understand and use the vocabulary related to length and use comparison to compare lengths.

We made plasticene snakes that were about 10 or 20 beads long on a bead string. We compared these to a photocopy of a beadstring.

After that, we had to measure some pictures of snakes and say how many beads long they would be. This was quite tricky as the snakes were curled up. we discussed how we could go about this. We decided we could use string to measure the snakes and then compare it against the bead string.

However, the string was quite hard to use so we deceided to go back to using the plasticene! This was much easier.

Superstars, I have added some measuring activities to our maths folder TES i-board that you can try at home. Click here.