Hello and welcome to our Class Blog. Our teacher is Mrs Hussain :)
Throughout May we took part in a creativity challenge at Mearns Primary. We worked with pupils from other schools to design an outfit with a science theme. We then used some of our technology skills (but mostly glue guns) to make the outfit. We also had movie editors and directors, a script writer and a narrator and a model. We put on a catwalk show for parents last Friday at Mearns Primary. Have a look at their twitter account for more photos!
P6a have been very busy this week! We had our firsr visit to Mearns Primary to begin our creativity challenge. The design brief has been set. It involves many different components. We have to design and make an outfit and accessories which has a given science focus, select music and write a script for our fashion show and produce a movie of the process! We will continue this throughout the month. Keep an eye out for photos from the the show!
This week we have been learning about the number of moons each planet has and why this number is not always the same from one year to the next. We also designed our own satellites and made rockets. Alasdair told us about NASA’s recent success in landing a reuseable rocket. This is a huge achievement and will impact on space travel greatly! We tested the rockets and used our knowledge of distance, speed and time to calculate their speed. It was a lot of fun!
Today we were learning about static electricity. This force attracts and repels. We used static electricity to move cans and bubbles!
 
This week we have been learning about forces and gravity. We began by learning about static electricity. We have experimented with balloons and know static electricity is related to electrons and lightning is linked to it too. We will be learning more about this next week.
We learned about magnetic poles and experimented with different sizes and shapes of magnet. We know a larger magnet doesn’t mean it is stronger. Next week we will make a game using magnets.
 
Finally we learned about gravity. We know gravity is a force which draws objects to the centre of earth and that two objects of the same size and shape will fall at the same rate because of gravity. It doesn’t matter what weight they are! We designed parachutes using our knowledge of air resistance and gravity to see if we could safely transport mini eggs from the balcony to the atrium. Everyone tested their original design and then made improvements. We discussed our changes with different teams to help us think about why we thought our changes would make the parachute better.
We then tested our designs twice. Some were more successful than others. Some toppled and the eggs cracked. Some had one or two eggs fall out. One parachute safely landed upright with all eggs safely intact and one box fell apart, though their parachute design was very good. All the eggs fell from quite a height!
Today we took part in the school science fair. This meant some of the class displayed their science presentations in the gym hall for P1-3 to see, we all visited P7 to see their wonderful interactive biology, chemistry and physics rooms and we then shared our displays with P7 when they visited us. We learned a lot and enjoyed sharing everything we have learned, so far, this year in science.
We have had a really exciting week focusing on Science.
We started on Monday with some technology, making cardboard boats, made water resistant with tin foil, competing to hold the most weight. Dasha, Charlotte, Zara, Melissa, Heather and Ruby crafted the winning boat. It held 1300g, (Ben said, “That’s 1.3kg!”). Well done!
On Wednesday our writing was related to topical science news. We read a few articles and related fact files. We worked on our note-taking skills and next week we will created a sci-fi story of our choosing, linked to our chosen article.
That wasn’t all! Also on Wednesday we visited a planatarium…in our gym hall! It was awesome. We learned lots about stars, which was really useful as we recently began our Space topic with Mrs Horne.
Thursday’s science was preparation for our Friday showcase. We picked our favourite topic from science so far this year, and I’m groups prepared a display to tell everyone about it. We made displays for electricity, rock types, the eye, the ear, chemical reactions, light, shadows and the planets.
 
On Friday we shared our knowledge and learned lots from the p7 displays which were interactive!
We had lots of fun all week!
Today we visited a planetarium in our gym hall. Continuing the Science Week theme of journeys we went on a journey to the moon in the past, the moon in the future, the stars, Mars and Jupiter. This was very interesting as we have recently completed research projects on a planet from our solar system. We also posed a question we were interested in, and then found the answer to share with the class.
“The pictures are quite dark because the planetarium had to be dark so you could see all the stars and planets.” Heather
“Light pollution from street lights makes it hard to see the stars so we can only see the brightest when we are outside.” Ayah
“If you go to the countryside you can see more stars.” Emily
Below is a picture of Jupiter.
“It is the biggest planet in the solar system. It was Steve’s favourite planet (The man who ran the planetarium) because it is interesting.” Dasha.
“It is the King of the Planets.” Heather
Below are pictures of Jupiter’s moons. “These were the first four to be discovered. They were discovered by Galileo Galilei.” Sonny
“He saw them first because they were the biggest.” Tom
“This shows the orbit of the four moons.” Cameron
“The big red spot is a storm that has been going on for a long time.” Adam
“”You could fit three Earth’s in it side by side.” Tom
“The red colour comes from the gases.” Max
“This is Roz the explorer that will be sent to Mars.” Abby
“It will take 6 months to get there and then it will dig down to see if there is life underneath.” Tom
“Once it gets to Mars it will stay there. It will send pictures and information back.” Emily
“It can identify life on the planet(biological matter).” Adam
“This is a footprint on the moon. It was made by Neil Armstrong. He was the first man to step on the moon.” Ayah
“It will have happened 50 years ago on the 20th to the 21st of July” Lewis
“When Neil Armstrong went on the moon he was joined by Buzz Aldrin.” Adam
“Michael Collins was there too but he stayed on the shuttle. Someone always stays on the rocket.” Reuben
“12 people have seen Earth while standing on the moon.” Lewis
We all enjoyed the experience.
“It felt like you were moving when you watched it” Hannah
“I liked when we saw the future moon. He said that in the future people might be able to live on the moon. It had big solar panels and garden areas.” Alasdair
“I liked the star constellations” Aaliyah
“I liked the idea of all the people visiting the moon” Irina
It was a great day!
In P6a we have been busy we have been doing some experiments! The coke and mentos eruption, browning apples and also…dancing raisins.
Each time we did the coke experiments we changed our variable. It was very intriguing. After we had done the experiments we all went into groups. One was looking at different types of cokes, another one was the different types of mentos, there were two more groups. In our groups we made bar charts and information boxes telling the person who was reading our poster about what we were doing. We drew the graphs but also made them on computers using excel. This was very confusing because we have had to learn something new but it was great fun! We also wrote a report about it in our writing jotters and stuck in some charts in the results section.
The dancing raisins were hilarious because they just kept jumping up because when Alka Seltzer was added to water it produced gas which attached to the raisins and made them go up and down. We wrote a report in our writing jotters, but with less help this time. It was very enjoyable!
We researched John Muir in class, creating fact files. We then chose an aspect of the outdoors to focus on as part of our project homework. We made dens, grew flowers, studied insects and trees, made rafts to sail, made bird feeders and homes for hedgehogs. We then delivered really interesting solo talks telling the class about our investigations and creations.
