This morning we learned about chemical reactions.  Chemical reactions are when two substances mix together to create a different substance.  The colour, the shape or the flexibility of the substance could change or the substances could explode!

We made lots of chemical reactions happen in class. We went outside and put mentos into diet coke.  When the mentos went in, the diet coke fizzed up and went over the top of the bottle!

We put milk into a bowl.  Then we put food colouring in the middle of the milk.  The food colouring stayed in the middle in a little blob.  Next we added a drop of Fairy Liquid.  When we added this, the food colouring spread out all over the milk.  After that we tried it with red food colouring, and with both red and blue food colouring, but nothing worked as well as just plain blue.

 

 

We put red food colouring and bicarbonate of soda into a bottle.  Then we added vinegar.  When the vinegar went into the bottle, it started to bubble up.  Miss McLean put more vinegar in so it kept bubbling up.

We thought about chemical reactions that happen all the time like when we use soap in the bath or shower, fire, water, salt, rust, photosynthesis, batteries and digestion.

After break, we were set a challenge.  The challenge was to build a bridge using Knex.  We had certain rules to follow.  We only had an hour, the bridge had to support it’s own weight and the bridge had to be at least 30cm long.

Before we started the challenge, we looked at some bridges in real life.  We could see that the bridges used lots of triangle shapes.  Miss McLean told us that this is because triangles are a very strong shape.

We worked in pairs or threes to create our bridge.  Once we were done, we all voted for the bridge we thought was the best/strongest.  The bridge that won was designed by Keira, Greta and Katie.  They all won lots of house points!

 

 

After lunch we went to the atrium and a man called Ross from Glasgow Science Centre came to talk to us about Oxygen.  We learned that you wouldn’t be able to survive without it.  Your nose is the first thing that takes in oxygen.  The hairs in your nose, bogeys and sneezing stop dust coming up your nose so that you only breathe in what you need.  We also learned that the heart beats 100 times in a minute, and goes faster if you are doing any exercise or sport.  The left side of your heart is stronger because it has to pump blood all the way around your body, but the right side just pumps to your lungs.  We know where the lungs are on our body because we had to stick them on a Velcro vest that Greta was wearing. We also learned about the veins and the arteries.  Iona had to crawl through tubes which represented the veins and arteries carrying balloons, which represented oxygen.  She gave the balloons to the muscles, because this is where oxygen goes when we breathe it in. Iona had to be careful because some of the balloons represented gas which we do not want to go to our muscles.  At the end, we breathe these gases out.  Iona let go off the balloons so they flew away like the gas does.

 

 

We loved today because we got to do some experiments, we learnt more about our body and we had fun!

Written by Lily and Sofia (with a little bit of help from Miss McLean) and checked and confirmed by p3a.