sciences – Page 14 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Where Have Our Butterflies Gone?

As we waved our butterflies off to the wider world, we talked about where they might go. Here are some of the ideas from the children in the Rainbow Room.

Summer: Edinburgh.
Leah P: to a garden.
George: to Australia.
Isaac: by the river.
Dylan: to the zoo to see other animals.
Joshua M: they’re going to Gretna and will fly every day.
Ben W.: to the meadows.
Grace: to Gran Canaria to get warm.
James: to another flower to get some nectar.
Sian: they will fly everywhere.
Rahat: to Africa.
Daisy: fly away outside.
Orla: to Ibiza.
Emma: to London.
Owen: to his Granny’s house.
Chloe: to Blackpool.
Noah: over the swimming pool.
Brogan: up in the sky to his house.
Paulina: to her home.

Please let us know if you think you see them anywhere boys and girls.

Butterfly News

Thom’s family had an interesting update on the butterflies that we released:

“Thom was very excited to see the butterfly still sitting on the flower when we returned to pick up Sophie at 3pm!”

That is surprising. Just as well we decided to go back in to Nursery after a while or we could have had a long wait. Perhaps they were just very happy where we left them?

Bye Bye Butterflies

After following the progress of our caterpillars which grew and formed their cocoons, we finally saw our beautiful butterflies emerging in their nets last week. After feeding them on sugary water and slices of oranges, it seemed that they were ready to fly off and on Thursday we found a quiet spot to release them near the nature area at the front of the school. Although they did not seem keen to leave us, Miss Kerr gave them a helping hand to settle on the flowers which gave everyone a chance to have a close look at our little butterflies before we waved them goodbye.
Click then click again to make photos bigger.

Floating and Sinking

The children have been taking lots of their learning outdoors in the recent warm weather and we captured some photos last week of a group investigating floating and sinking. There was lots of discussion about exactly what was happening and why some objects “stayed on the top” and some “went down to the bottom”. What better way to learn than with big bowls of water in the sunshine?
Let’s hope that this wonderful weather continues as one of the current areas of interest is searching for minibeasts in the garden.

Cocoons

Our little caterpillars have been so busy munching away on their food, carefully watched by the excited Nursery boys and girls, that they are now at the stage of cocoons. Today they were transferred to their nets and we hope that beautiful butterflies will emerge in a week or two. If you ask the children, they will be able to show you the cocoons and tell you all about them.

An Exciting Parcel

An exciting little parcel arrived in Nursery last week which caused everyone to stop and look carefully. It was our own little tub of caterpillars to help our learning about life cycles. The children are keeping a close eye on them and already they have grown considerably. Why not ask the children to show you them in Nursery and see if they can tell you what is going to happen next to our caterpillars?

Seed Planting

After learning a little about Vincent Van Gogh, the children have been planting sunflowers as well as painting them. We have talked about what they will need to do to make their seed grow and about the different parts of a plant so hopefully the children should be able to look after them when they bring their sunflowers home soon. We look forward to hearing about some super sunflowers or even seeing a photo once they begin to grow. Fingers crossed that they can be planted outdoors and turn into a lovely burst of sunshine in a corner of everyone’s garden.

Keen Gardeners

As we have been learning about the signs of Spring and we will soon be finding out how things grow, the children have been planting some flowers in the garden. As you can see, we had keen helpers who did careful planting and then watered the plants to help them grow. We will all have to remember to look after them over the next few weeks but you made a good start all you keen gardeners.

Ice Investigators

There is no better way to learn about the signs of winter than to be outdoors on a frosty day which is exactly what the weather brought us this week. The effects of a frosty night brought excitement and great opportunities for the children to learn about winter weather. Hard, frozen ground and puddles of ice became exciting resources to experiment with and the children had lots of discussion about how it felt and what would happen if they took it inside. Cayne said, “If you stamp it, it crunches but it goes to water inside”.
We had a super team of investigators trying to work out why the digging area had become so hard and various tools were used to try to break it up. Ben said, “If you drag ice, it breaks a bit” and there was a lot of discussion about whether the digging area would stay like this forever because the sun was out but the ice was not melting.
Instead of our mud kitchen, the children decided that they would have an ice kitchen and they set about making soup and ‘hot stuff’ because they thought it would warm us up. There was certainly a lot of cooking going on and we had helpers in all corners of the garden searching for pieces of ice to break up for ingredients. James said, “You can saw ice off a puddle to make it better”.
We counted how many pieces of ice we had in a pan and discussed the different sizes and shapes of them – some children noticed that we couldn’t find a circular piece of ice which caused some great discussion. We even found a few frozen numbers and tried to find others. Well done all you super thinkers who were outdoors this week – you helped each other to learn about the effects of winter.

Christmas Fayre

With the school Christmas Fayre tomorrow (Thursday), we have been making chocolate Christmas shapes to sell on our stall. Discussions about what would happen when we put chocolate in the microwave then the fridge developed the children’s learning about sciences. We also used numeracy skills to count the squares of chocolate as well as reading the dial to set the microwave so there was lots of learning going on as we prepared our chocolate shapes.

We hope that lots of Nursery children and their families will be able to come to the Christmas Fayre tomorrow between 2.00 and 4.00 in school. We can certainly recommend the chocolate shapes to anyone who has a little money to spend.