sciences – Page 6 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Weather Watching Equipment

During the course of last year our weather watching equipment slowly felt the effects of lots of use and was no longer suitable for the children to observe weather changes so we decided to make new equipment ourselves. Here you can see a group in the Rainbow Room garden carefully using the tools to make their own rain gauge. They tested it out with bowls and scoops to make sure that the rain would travel down the tubes and were pleased with their work so we now have a super new rain catcher in the Rainbow Room garden. Why not have a look at their work on your way to or from Nursery?

Learning Is Fun

Baking provides so many opportunities for learning and the children love taking part in it. Apart from turn-taking, sharing, good listening and working as a team, the children can develop their knowledge and skills in several other areas of the curriculum.
Counting and measuring, essential when following a recipe, are “Numeracy and Mathematics” skills while prediction, observation and discussion about the potential changes to their ingredients, as they are mixed and cooked, is an area of “Sciences”. The children are also developing their understanding in “Technologies” as they learn how to use a mixer and the cooker.
Here the children were making chocolate chip cookies and it was wonderful to see their excitement and enthusiasm as they went through the process and then enjoyed tasting what they had produced. Learning can be such fun!

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Learning With Jelly

Apart from being great fun, making jelly develops the children’s understanding of solids and liquids and the processes we go through for solids to become liquids then back to solids. Science activities provide the ‘hands on’ approach to help the children to remember what they have learned having seen it in front of their own eyes. Just to add to the excitement of the activity, the children then had jelly to enjoy as part of their snack in the afternoon and nothing tastes better to the children than a snack they have prepared themselves.

Playdough Chefs

Measuring and counting are a big part of making playdough and some of the children have been learning to follow instructions to make their own dough. It’s much more fun to play with dough that you have made yourself and the children were keen to follow the recipe and choose their own colour. Here is our little group of chefs busy at their work.

Fizzy Fun

As part of their learning to make predictions and observations in science experiments, these children explored making fizzy potions outdoors. They measured vinegar and washing-up liquid in to a container then decided what to add to make a range of different fountains – various food colourings, stars and glitter were all very popular. As with all good potion mixing, they children had to give their concoction a good stir and a few magic words before adding baking soda to produce an exciting fizzy fountain. As you can imagine, we tried this out several times and used different quantities of ingredients each time to observe what happened. The children showed good focus and made some great comments as they observed the process.

Sophia: it explodes. It’s green. I mixed it.
Jack: I was doing a scientist. I put sugar in it and it makes bubbles. It explodes like a volcano. Mine was yellow bubbles with lots of stars.
Aoife: I’m making a volcano like where the lava comes out.
Letti: I put stars in the mixture. It was really high. The stars came out into there.
Emilia: we add vinegar and washing machine shampoo. It grew really high. It exploded!
Freddie: we used a spoon to mix it. It blows up.
Emily: I’m making an experiment. I’m a scientist. I was making potions. It exploded.
Arthur: I’m making a volcano. It was big and blue. I am a scientist.
Leigha: I’m stirring it with the spoon. It can get out big.

Dancing Raisins

Simple science experiments are very popular in our Nursery and the children have learned to make predictions before they carry them out then observe what happens to see if they were right. As part of a focus on floating and sinking, the children experimented by putting raisins in lemonade to see if they would sink or float and, as you can see, they were very engaged in observing the changes they saw. They saw the raisins float as the bubbles of carbon dioxide stuck to them causing them to rise to the surface and were amazed when the some of the bubbles popped, causing the raisins to sink. This happened several times before all the gas was used up and, finding it hard to believe what they had seen, the children wanted to try out this experiment over and over again.
We thought that we would share some of the their comments.
Jackson: there’s bubbles. I put in the lemonade. The raisins are dancing.
Tom: bubbles move up and down.
Arthur: the raisins are going up and down.
Alexa: the bubbles stick to the raisins and make them dance. Bubbles give us hiccups when we drink them.
Nancy: we’re making the raisins float and sink. Look they’re dancing. The bubbles make them go up and down.
Jack: They are floating. Bubbles go up and down and make the raisins jump.
Sophia: I was putting raisins in lemonade. They were dancing about.
Emilia: look at the bubbles. They are dancing, lots of dancing.

Art And Science

Art and science came together in this activity when the children were learning about light and shade. Lots of great concentration was evident as the children made their own stained glass artwork to display on the windows in Nursery.

Bye Bye Butterflies

Just like the Rainbow Room, those in the Raindrop Room cared for their little caterpillars until they developed into butterflies and were delighted to release them in their garden. Keep a close eye out for them when you’re out and about in the summer holidays everyone.

Bye Bye Butterflies

After caring for their little butterflies, the children in the Rainbow Room finally released them after observing them so closely from being little caterpillars. Although they did not seem keen to leave us, Miss Kerr gave them a helping hand to settle on our plants in the outdoor area which gave everyone a chance to have a close look at our little butterflies before we waved them goodbye.

Word of The Week

In the Rainbow Room “Word of the Week” is ‘symmetry’, as they experiment to make symmetrical pictures, and the Raindrop Room has “life cycle” as their focus as they are beginning to look after their caterpillars.