STEM – Primary 1.4

It’s all go!

Classroom design

A huge thank you to the boys and girls in P1.4 for their help last week. We decided to move our classroom around and found a lot of mess hidden behind furniture. The class helped me pick up useful resources, bin/recycle rubbish and hoover! We discussed hazards and ensured we were keeping ourselves safe. We love our new classroom layout and will post a picture of the final product next week after a few finishing touches are made.

P.E (Street)

As you will be aware, our Street P.E time has changed from a Tuesday to a Monday. Today we were practising our ball skills and explored different types of passes with our partner.

STEM

As part of ‘STEM fortnight’, we had the opportunity to use the VR headsets in class. We are all very interested in learning about creatures that live in the sea and were able to look at these through our headsets. We saw lots of fish, sea turtles and sharks!

Musicality

Mrs Kelly is continuing to visit us every two weeks for Musicality. Today we were using her rainbow bells which each have a different pitch. We were given turns at being composers and at ringing the bells.

Weather watching 👀

Today we looked at the weather forecast and observed the weather throughout the day.

We have seen heavy rain showers, sunshine, rainbows and windy spells all over the course of a few hours. How lucky are we?

As our independent craft, we created wind measures. We loved taking these outside and watching them dance in the wind!

For Literacy today we wrote a story about a Windy Day, considering what we might do or what we might see. Here is an example of one of our fantastic stories.

1.4 Update

December

At the beginning of December, we loved decorating our class Christmas tree and showed excellent teamwork whilst assembling it 🙂

Nativity

We have been practising lots for our upcoming Nativity show. We are doing really well even though our song has lots of words to learn. One week left of rehearsals and then you will get to come and see us perform. Woohoo! Please practise with us at home if you can.

Topical Science

It has been very cold lately and in the past week temperatures dropped to -10 through the night. We wanted to see if objects would freeze in water if left outside overnight and all predicted this would be successful. We were right! We discussed which of the objects floated and which sunk and also tried to problem solve the fastest way to set the objects free.

We briefly went outside to look at our playground and discuss how to be safe on frosty days, paying close attention to ice on the ground. We quickly snapped a picture then went back inside to get cosy.

Christmas Fayre

Thank you for purchasing our Christmas crafts. We were able to choose whether we wanted to make a reindeer, Santa or a snowman and demonstrated excellent gluing and cutting skills. The money raised by primary 1 will go towards resourcing play in our classrooms 🙂

How tall are you? 📏

On Thursday we worked in pairs to measure ourselves! One pupil lay on the ground while the other joined the unifix cubes together to make a long line beside their partner. We made sure it lined up with the top of our heads and bottom of our feet. It was good fun counting up to 60 and nearly 70 too!

Water Filtration Experiment

Disclaimer: Camera hand over to our official class photographers! 😀

We worked in trios last week to clean the dirty playground water we collected! We used coffee filters, sand, cotton balls & rocks to filter out dirty water. We were amazed by how clean the water looked at the end. We annotated a diagram labelling our experiment! Well done P1.4 ⭐️

Potion Making!

We had lots of fun making potions this week. As part of this challenge, we had to choose which objects we wanted to include in our potion, share our choices with our teacher to be recorded on our ingredients list and measure out quantities of ‘magic powder’ and ‘special brew’.

We loved watching the potions bubble and fizz when everything was mixed together and got very excited when some overflowed and had to be quickly taken to the sink! We observed that the more magic powder (bicarbonate soda) and ‘special brew’ (vinegar) we added, the more likely the potion was to overflow.

Spark Park Fundraising Event

Today was a fantastic first day back after our October break. We enjoyed lots a fun activities on the pitch and then watched M&M’s Sleeping Beauty production in the gym hall.

Mrs Stephenson was so happy with our efforts and amazing listening skills. We are definitely a class that loves pantomimes (which we demonstrated with our enthusiastic participation throughout!). Thankfully Maleficent was defeated… phew!

3D Shape Robots

Thank you for all your junk materials. The pupils had a great afternoon sorting and building their shape robots last week.

We categorised every item into each shape: Cylinders, cubes, cuboids, spheres and cones. Anything we didn’t know was put back in the ‘we don’t know’ pile.

Some pupils wanted to work with a friend and others independently. Their creations were brilliant and they were able to engage in conversations about what 3D shape made up different parts of their robots! Some pupils went on to create lovely Lego robots during play. Well done P1.4!

It’s raining, it pouring! ☔

What do you do when it rains? Most people stay inside, but not us! We went outside and watched as the heavy rain fell on Thursday. We looked to see where the rainwater was flowing, where it was collecting and where it went?

The pupils were fascinated about where it went next after flowing through the drain.

“It goes in the river.”

“It goes down the drain and down more drains and more drains and into the sea.”

“It goes into the sewer.”

I explained that a lot of our water is collected, cleaned and then comes out our taps. We watched a video about the Water Works and the process of water filtration!

We ran outside, collected a big tub of dirty water and created our own water filtration experiment. Pupils will have another chance to do this next week – photos to follow.