On Friday when we came into school and Miss McLean put us into groups from 1 to 11. Then we went to the Atrium, where we were told how to make a rocket mouse. After that we were shown to our tables and met lots of other children. Parents were there too!

We had a time limit to make our own rocket mice – 25 minutes. After that we had two heats to see which mouse would fly ( with the help of some empty milk cartons ) the highest.

Each group came out individually to set their mice off. The person who’s mouse flew the highest went into the final heat- the final!

Two people got into the last heat from our class- Keira and Sofia. Unfortunately they did not win.  We had a class competition for the best design. Sean won!

When we came back, we learned about how aeroplanes fly.  They fly using four forces – thrust, weight, lift and drag. The wings being curved on an aeroplane causes the force lift.

We made two paper aeroplanes next.  We had to make one that would fly far and one that would stay in the air for a long time.  We had to test our aeroplanes in the class and we were allowed to try and improve them if we could.

We had a competition on the pitch.  Keira’s went the furthest and Lucie’s stayed in the air for the longest time.

After lunch, we made cress heads.  First we had to put a pair of tights over a cup and fill the tights with cress seeds and soil.  Sometimes Miss McLean forgot about the cress! Oops!  Then we tied the ends of the tights and made a nose on our head.  We have taken the cress heads home, and when the seed germinates, we have to cut a hole in the tights so the cress can grow.

We loved STEM week and are sad that it is over.  We hope we get to do it again next year.

On Wednesday we learned about renewable and non renewable energy.

Energy is what powers things up.  We use energy to keep our food cool in the fridge, to drive our vehicles, to use our computers, to watch TV and to switch on our lights.  We use energy every day for lots of reasons.

Renewable energy is energy that will last as long as the Earth does.  Types of renewable energy are water, wind and sunshine.

Non-renewable energy is energy that will eventually run out.  Types of non-renewable energy are petrol, coal and natural gas.

We looked at Wind Power.  We get wind power from wind turbines.  Wind turbines are now built in wind farms on land and more recently have been built in the sea.  The wind makes the blades of the wind turbine spin round.  When the blades move, it turns a generator through a drive shaft which creates electricity.  All of the wind turbines in the farm are connected so they all move together.

We made our own windmills from paper, a stick, a butterfly clip, Sellotape and a juice straw.  It was quite tricky to work out how we could get the blades to spin, but eventually (when the orange juice arrived from the kitchen) we found a solution.  Some of them weren’t as spinny as we would like them to be, so we talked about the space between the clip and the straw.  We would need to make the hole bigger for the windmill to turn quickly.

Here’s a photo of some of us, and our windmills.

In the afternoon, Mr Adams visited our class.  Mr Adams is a doctor who mainly looks after babies, but sometimes children too.  He works for the NHS.  He works in a hospital in Kilmarnock.  He talked about how to be healthy by keeping fit, drinking water and eating a balanced diet.  Mr Adams said the best water for you is tap water because it’s fresh.  We thought that was quite interesting.  He also told us about the most common accident in the hospital, which is falling off a trampoline.  We all will be very careful on trampolines in the future! We were interested in what bone is the easiest to break, and Mr Adams told us it is the collarbone.  He told us the most common bone broken in one in your arm.  We really liked having Mr Adams in and asking him questions.  It was very, very, very interesting!

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.

Primary 3a have been finding out about deforestation.  We all decided as a class that we are against deforestation having looked at the pros and cons.  We then chose to write a persuasive letter to a large company who cuts down the rainforest for paper.

The Rowling and Wilson group wrote a letter together.  You can read our letter below.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are writing to tell you that deforestation is disgraceful.  According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, an estimated 18 million acres of forest are lost each year.  We think this is wrong for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, deforestation harms animals.  Up to 28 thousand species are to become extinct within the next 25 years because of deforestation.  Animals lose their habitats and become endangered.  Animals are not able to find their food so they start to get sick and die.  Animals like monkeys might get hurt because the trees are falling down.  Birds that are in the rainforest won’t be able to build their nests and lay eggs.  Fruit bats that live in the rainforest won’t be able to hang off the trees.  Tree frogs won’t be able to climb up trees. Surely you should notice that you are destroying animals’ habitats and letting them become extinct?

I believe that cutting down trees is wrong because you are destroying plants which give us medicine.  Destroying medicine means people who are sick won’t get better.  If you continue to destroy the rainforest you will make us lose 121 natural remedies which can be used for medicine.  In the future we won’t discover new medicine if deforestation continues.

Cutting down the rainforest makes us lose 20% of our oxygen.  20% of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon.  Oxygen is what we need to keep us alive, so of course we believe that deforestation should be stopped.

I hope the person responsible will take all of these facts in and think carefully before you keep going and destroying the rainforest.  Thank you for reading our letter.

Yours faithfully,

Primary 3a

Today we went to Amazonia. Amazonia is an indoor rainforest.

A lady called Kerry took us on a tour around Amazonia. On the tour we saw lots of animals like frogs (Miss McLean is very scared of frogs!), anacondas, parrots, goeldi’s monkeys, lizards, piranhas, a tarantula, a toucan and macaws.

We went into the nocturnal area. There were animals inside who come out in the dark, so the nocturnal area was very gloomy. Inside we saw fruit bats, boa constrictors, scorpions and kinkajous.

After we had been on the tour we went into the handling room. In this room we were allowed to hold real rainforest and desert animals. First we held hissing cockroaches called Ralph. When the cockroaches are scared they hiss like a snake to scare their predators away. Cockroaches will eat anything they get the chance to – even smelly socks! Next we touched Bubbles the fat tailed gecko. Bubbles’ tail can come off if he wants to escape from a predator but it makes him poorly. Last but not least we held Ziggy the royal python. Ziggy can only eat things which will fit in his mouth. He killed his prey by strangling it – he was not a venomous snake. He has over 500 weak and bendy bones in his body so we had to be very careful and not squeeze him – we didn’t want to break any of his bones. We also got to pass around a snake skeleton in a box so we could see what Ziggy looks like inside. Kerry told Sofia and Greta that Cleopatra used to wear royal pythons as bracelets and that is how they got their name.

We went into the interactive room next with a lady called Amy. We played a game where we had to catch as many butterflies as we could. In the next game we had to make a big rainstorm by clapping our hands as much as we could. When we were done we saw some pictures of us playing the game. At the end, Amy told us that she heard us talking about the rainforest and deforestation. She said she had been working in Amazonia for four years and we gave the best facts she had ever heard!

“World Book Day was awesome!” – Sean

Today was World Book Day and we all dressed up as a character from a book.

We started the day by planning a story that we are going to enter into a competition. If the school supplies the best entries we will win £500 for Netherlee! We will also get a real book of all our stories.

We went into P2D and watched a video about Michael Morporgo and what techniques he uses to write his books. We also told primary 2 what we had dressed up as.

After break we thought about why we couldn’t live without books. Sorcha said that books are like paper friends filled with knowledge. Miss McLean liked that a lot!

Here is some of us dressed up. Can you guess what we are dressed up as?

We have been learning to use search engines such as Google.

Search engines are websites where you can search for information or for websites. You can look up things that you don’t know or want to double check.

We have been thinking about when you might need to use Google. You can use it to find images. You can also use Google to find a map if you need to go somewhere that you have never been before. If you need to get a train somewhere and you aren’t sure what times the trains depart from your station, you could look that up on Google. If you were going to see a movie you could look up what times the film is on using a search engine. If you were not feeling well, you can look up your symptoms online to try and work out what is wrong with you. If you want to do some internet shopping you could Google the shop to find the website.

We used Google to research animals because our Science topic is Living and Non-Living Things. When you Google something, you just type in the keywords because if you don’t you will get too many websites to choose from. Once we had researched an animal on Google, we also learned how to find images and to copy and paste them into a word document.

Sam and Greta modelling what Google looks like – how excited does Sam look?!

We have been learning about Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh was a famous artist who is well known for paintings like ‘Sunflowers’ and ‘Starry Night’.

Van Gogh was born in 1853. He was a post-impressionist artist. We have also learned about other famous artist called Claude Monet. He happened to be an impressionist artist too.

Van Gogh had depression and art was one of the only things that made him feel a little better. His depression was so bad that at one point he cut off his right ear lobe.

We think Van Gogh’s paintings look very realistic. He used big dramatic brush strokes to make Starry Night look like the wind in the sky is moving.

Van Gogh died in 1890.

Once we had learned about Van Gogh, we decided to recreate his famous painting ‘Starry Night’. We followed a step-by-step guide to create our pictures. We used oil pastels to create our version. We used different shades of blue in our sky to make it look as realistic as possible. We had to do little dotted lines with our oil pastels.

Our versions of Starry Night are on display inside and outside our classroom. A few teachers have commented on how much they like them already.

“I’m proud of my version of Starry Night because it looks like the wind is moving.” – Zak

“The part I enjoyed most of all was doing the shading on the big building.” – Sean

“I’m proud of my picture because it is eye catching, even from far away.” – Ben

Hello World!

Welcome to the Class of 2012’s blog. We are the current Primary 3 at Netherlee Primary School.

We are using a blog to share what we are learning with our families, carers, friends and school community. We will be posting a little bit about what we have been doing and learning as regularly as we can.

We will be updating and adding to the blog regularly throughout the year. To begin with, P3a will take responsibility for updating and posting.

We hope you enjoy finding out what we have been learning!

P3a