All posts by Miss Yarrow

So much friction!

Our learning context this term is ‘transport’.

As part of the planning process for our learning context, we came up with some questions we needed answered. One of our questions was ‘how do cars travel on different surfaces; how can they sometimes skid and sometimes not skid?‘.

In order to help us answer this, we looked at a PowerPoint presentation all about something called ‘friction‘. Friction is a force between two surfaces. 

We learned that the more friction there is between the two things, the slower the object may move. So if a car was travelling on the road, there is more friction than if it was travelling on the ice. The car would be more likely to slip on the ice as there is less friction.

To test this out, we took a car and a ramp around the school. Before hand though we made predictions about which surface would produce the least friction with the car.

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Santa ready to learn about friction.

We let the car travel down the ramp onto different surfaces. The first surface we tested was tarmac outside. The car traveled 5 of one of the children’s feet from the ramp.

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The second surface we tested was the carpet in the corridor. The car traveled 6 feet in length.

The final surface was the wooden floor in the dinner hall. The car traveled a whole 10 feet!

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Those of us who had predicted there would be the least friction between the car and the wooden floor were right! (Which was actually most of us).

As a final test, Miss Yarrow got us to test the amount of friction between the wooden floor and our shoes. We kept our shoes on and tried to skid on the ground. We couldn’t move very far. Some of us even made burn marks where the rubber on our shoes was too hot because of the friction. After this, we took our shoes off and tried the same thing but in our socks. We traveled further in our socks, showing that there was less friction between them and the wooden floor.

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We all enjoyed learning about friction in this active way and we think Santa learned a lot too. The test we did made it easier to understand why cars can travel better on different surfaces.

Exploring Our Sense of Taste

Today we taught Santa about our sense of taste.

We had already looked briefly at our 5 senses; taste, touch, hearing, sight, smell but this week we chose to focus on our sense of taste and look at it in a bit more depth.

We talked about the different taste sections on our tongues and showed Santa where these are. (We wondered if Panda’s have the same sense of taste as us)?

Once we had revised our prior learning, Miss Yarrow brought out different types of foods.

We explored one type of food at a time. The first food we tried was dark chocolate. We were a bit surprised at the taste of the chocolate; it tasted nothing like milk chocolate. Only a few of us actually enjoyed the taste. Most of us didn’t like it. After trying it, we all voted for what taste we thought it had. Miss Yarrow recored our results in a Pictograph on the whiteboard. We counted with her to make sure she got it right. Most of us thought that the chocolate was bitterimage-02-11-15-08-00-2image-02-11-15-08-00-5

image-02-11-15-08-00-4Next, we tried fizzy strawberry laces. Unlike the chocolate, most of us really enjoyed the laces. When we voted for the taste, we learned that different people have different tastes; some of us thought the laces were really sour and others thought they were really sweet.

image-02-11-15-08-00-8After the laces we tried some crisps. Miss Yarrow didn’t tell us what flavour they were to start with, because she thought the flavour would give the taste away! Most of us enjoyed the crisps too and the result with the highest number of votes was ‘salty‘. After we had voted, Miss Yarrow told us that the crips were ‘ready salted’ flavour, so we had been correct in our votes.

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image-02-11-15-08-00-11The next food was lemon. Miss Yarrow laughed at some of the faces we pulled when we ate the lemon. Our pictograph results showed that most of us thought the lemon was sour, but some of us also thought it was bitter.

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image-02-11-15-08-01-1image-02-11-15-08-01-2image-02-11-15-08-01-5image-02-11-15-08-01-6The final food to try was pineapple. It was so juicy! Most of us really enjoyed the pineapple and the majority of us thought that the pineapple was sweetimage-02-11-15-08-01-9To test our learning, Miss Yarrow asked us to name the 4 different types of taste on our tongue. She was impressed with our understanding.

As a wee extra treat and challenge, Miss Yarrow gave us some popcorn. She explained that the popcorn had 2 flavours; sweet and salty. Our challenge was to eat one piece of popcorn at a time and see if we could tell if it was salty or sweet. We were to discuss our ideas with our shoulder partner (but also just enjoy the popcorn at the same time). image-02-11-15-08-01-12Santa had fun learning all about our sense of taste but we felt a bit bad that he couldn’t enjoy the food as well.

Pumpkin Science with Santa the Panda

We decided to show Santa a pumpkin today because it is Halloween tomorrow.

We passed the pumpkin around our circle and all gave an adjective to describe what the pumpkin looked or felt like.

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After that, Miss Yarrow revealed a tub of water and said that we were going to do some pumpkin science as well. She asked us to predict if we thought the pumpkin would float or sink? Most of us thought the pumpkin would float. We tested to see if our predictions were accurate; the pumpkin bobbed on the top of the water, which meant that it was floating! (If it had sunk, it would have dropped to the bottom of the basin). Miss Yarrow told us that there was a scientific word for floating and that word is buoyancy and we can say that things are more or less dense than other things. So, instead of saying that the pumpkin floated in the water, we could say that the pumpkin was buoyant  in or less dense than water.

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We discussed why this might be the case. One of us suggested that its because there isn’t ‘stuff’ filling up the inside and that there’s space in it. Miss Yarrow explained that was in fact correct, and that because pumpkins are hollow, they have air in them, which makes them float/less dense. It didn’t matter that the pumpkin felt heavy to us (boats are heavy but they float in the ocean).

Next, Miss Yarrow asked us to ‘gut’ our pumpkin. We loved getting messy and taking the pumpkins insides, out. We got rid of the flesh and kept the seeds for our next experiment. We made new predictions about whether the  seeds would be more or less dense than water. This time, most of us thought they would be more dense and that they would sink. We believed this because we thought that the insides were full up this time and not hollow. However, when we tested them, they all stayed floating on the surface too.

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We each took a pumpkin seed home with us to remind us of today’s learning.

Santa was impressed with our topical science. He learned a lot about pumpkins and buoyancy!

Wild Flower Planting

This week we were invited by a lady called Kathy from land services to sow wild flower seeds with her, the local wildlife rangers and some members of the local church; we were excited to take her up on the offer.

We explained to Kathy that Santa always comes with us when we do anything ‘sciencey’. She was happy to let Santa come along with us to help us sow the wild flower seeds.

The day before we went, Miss Yarrow wanted to check our understanding of how plants grow. We shared all the facts that we knew about how to plant seeds, what they need to grow and how to look after them. We also listened to an interactive story online. The information from the story matched what we had already told Miss Yarrow, so she thought that we were definitely ready to sow some seeds. Santa learned a lot from us too!

On Monday morning some Kathy and some kind parent helpers came down to the school to walk up with us to Gartmorn Dam. Luckily, it was a lovely morning for us.

When we got to the dam, some adults had already prepared the soil so that it was ready for us to sow the seeds. We split into different groups and teamed up with some adults. Each group was given a tub that had a sand and wild flower seed mix in it. Our job was to ‘shake, shake, shake’ the tub so that the seeds and sand spread across all of the soil. Santa helped us out too!

Once the tubs were empty, we were given some extra poppy seeds to sprinkle across the soil as well.

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image-28-09-15-09-08-12 Before we left, we were given some packets of wild flower seeds for us to sow in the school, as well as some little minibeast hotels to build. The countryside ranger said that some of the minibeasts might have started hibernating already, so we are going to hang onto the hotels and build them in the spring time.

We had great fun with everyone and can’t wait for the flowers to grow. We are excited to have helped make a new habitat area for the wildlife up at the dam (especially for the bees).

Thanks to Kathy for inviting us up and to all the adults that made our morning fun! Keep an eye out in the Alloa Advertiser for us and Santa. We got lots of pictures taken by the photographer!

Citizen Science…OPAL Earthworm Survey

The day after our bird dance and water experiment, Miss Yarrow told us all about citizen science. She explained that scientists are too busy to do all the research that they need to do, all themselves, so they need children like us to help them.

It was our job to carry out a survey from OPAL, that would let us see how many and what kind of worms were living areas of the school ground.

We had to follow the instructions carefully, to make sure that we dug the right size of ditch.  We worked as two teams (so we had two ditches). Next we searched through the soil and turf to see if we could find any worms.

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The first group found 20 worms over all and the second group found 18. There was way more worms underground compared to the day before when we had to wait for them to surface.

It started pouring down, so we weren’t able to sort and classify our worms outdoors, but we used the photographs we had taken to discuss our findings once we were back inside. There were lots of different worms; some long, some short, some fat, some thin, some dark and some lighter. We think there was different species in the ditches.

Miss Yarrow has filled in our results and will send them off to the scientists at OPAL. Santa was pleased that we were responsible citizens and he liked that we care about science in Scotland.

Worm Experiment!

As well as learning about birds last week, we wanted to learn about worms too.

To start off with, Miss Yarrow read us a story called ‘Diary of a Worm’. Santa enjoyed hearing all about what the worm got up to with us.

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We then talked about the new information that the book had taught it us, as well as sharing the things we remembered from our mini-beast week.

After reading the book, we decided to do an experiment outside. Our experiment was to test the best way to find worms.  We had learned that the worms don’t like it when it rains because it fills their tunnels up and we discovered that birds do a funny dance to trick that worms into thinking that it is raining. So, to do our experiment, we first split into 2 groups. One of the groups was to use water to try and get the worms to come up and the other group was to do a bird dance. We got to choose which group to be part of. Luckily, the groups were even to keep the experiment fair.

Before we went out, we made predictions about which method we thought would be the best. 15 of us thought that the water would bring the most worms up and 8 of us thought that the dancing would work best, because birds usually get lots of worms that way. Miss Yarrow liked that we were using our knowledge and problem solving to think of reasons for our predictions.

We went outside onto 2 bits of grass close by each other. We waited until both groups were ready to begin. When it was time, one group started dancing and the other poured water (but stayed still like statues). Miss Yarrow and Mrs Beveridge timed us, and when it was time to stop, we had to carefully search the grass for any worms. Santa had a go with both groups so that he could see everything that was going on.

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Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best day for worm finding! Between the two groups, we only managed to find one worm, and that was from the water group.

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We decided that the ground must have been far too dry where the dancers were. We had previously learned that worms breathe through their skin and that if they are too dry they might not survive, so we thought that was why they weren’t being tricked  by us!

It didn’t matter that our predictions weren’t accurate, we enjoyed having a go at guessing and had fun doing our experiment. Santa had fun too!

Bird Feeders

Last week, we decided to learn a bit about birds.

We wanted to know what types of birds there are in Scotland.

We looked at the RSPB website and learned about what birds we would be likely to see in our gardens. The site gave us information about the birds’ diet, where they nest and what they sound like.

As a class, we decided that it would be a good idea to feed the birds that live around the school area. As we had learned that some birds eat worms, nuts, seeds and insects, we thought it would be a good idea to have some of these foods in our feeders.

We had the choice of making a feeder from garden wire, cheerios and blueberries or one using toast, peanut butter and bird seed. Both feeders were fun to make. We even pretended that we were birds and had a taste of some of the ingredients.

Unfortunately, we forgot to invite Santa along when we were making our feeders, so the next morning, before going out to hang them up around the school, we told Santa all about our feeders. Miss Yarrow  was really impressed at all the bird facts and information we had remembered.

Finally, we got to go outside and hang up our feeders. It was up to us where to hang them. We tried to spread them out around the school and put them in places that the birds could get to. Two nosy crows watched us as we hung them up (we were sure that they were going to eat them as soon as we left!).

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(one of the crows on the roof)

As we walked around, we pretended to be bird watchers. We spotted a few Blackbirds and some Seagulls. We could hear the songs  of some smaller birds too, but we couldn’t see them.

DSCN0311 DSCN0313 DSCN0314 DSCN0315We hope the birds have enjoyed our eating from our feeders.

 

 

 

Tree-whacking and Mini-Beast Hotel

Santa came outdoors with us, to see what life we could find up the trees outside our classroom. We have learned that mini-beasts have different habitats, so we figured that some must live in trees.

We took out some big white sheets and some metre sticks. We put the sheets under the trees and gave the branches a whack. As we did this, we watched the sheets, to see what living things had landed on them.

DSCN0237 DSCN0240 DSCN0245We observed that different trees were home to different mini-beasts. We had a big discussion about whether this was because of the type of tree, the size of tree, the type of leaves it had, or where it was growing (in the sun or in the shade). We found a cool caterpillar on one tree and a big spider on another tree. All the trees had little flies and different beetles and insects.

DSCN0241 DSCN0247 DSCN0248 DSCN0251After finding out that there are lots of different mini-beasts that need different habitats, we decided to build our own habitat. We went off into the woods to gather some sticks, grass and stones. Santa enjoyed his time in the woods helping us gather resources. We made sure that there were no mini-beasts on the sticks that we picked up as we know its important not to remove them from the environment that they are used. to (otherwise they might not survive). DSCN0254 DSCN0256 DSCN0260 DSCN0265Once we had gathered what we needed, we collected some pallets and took them to an area of left-over turf. We decided that it was a good idea to re-use turf that had been dug up by another class, rather than buying new stuff. Mrs Sherry and Miss Yarrow helped us build the hotel and we added all our sticks, stones and grass etc. When we were building, we found worms, beetles, slugs, woodlice and….a FROG, in amongst the turf. We were all really excited that Santa got to see all that Scottish wildlife.

DSCN0268 DSCN0269 DSCN0270 DSCN0277(Santa keeping an eye on us…making sure we were working hard).

DSCN0279 DSCN0283Miss Yarrow is going to bring in some more turf that we can re-use as a roof for our hotel. We feel like we have done a really good job in contributing to the environment with our mini-beast hotel. Now all that is left to do is to make some signs to let people know about it, and encourage them not to touch it so that the wild-life can start moving in.

 

 

 

Santa comes Mini-beast hunting

As a class we decided that this term, we wanted to find out about living things in our environment .

This week our learning focus is ‘Mini-beasts’.  We decided that we could go outdoors to see what mini-beasts had habitats within the school grounds. Before going on our mini-beat hunt, we watched some clips on youtube and found out about the different families of mini-beasts. We learned that mini-beasts with 0 legs are called Annelids or Molluscs, ones with 6 legs are known as Insects, ones with a protective shell or different segments of body are called Crustaceans, mini-beasts with 8 legs are known as Arachnids and ones with too many legs to count are called Myriapods. These are tricky words to remember but we liked learning the real terms for the different invertebrate families and we had fun learning the words with Santa.

DSCN0213DSCN0211We made predictions about what mini-beasts we thought we would see on our hunt. Santa also though that we might find a centipede!Rachael's predictionBefore we went outside, we got our clipboards and checklists ready so that we could record our results. We also took the key that Miss Yarrow had shown us, so that we could identify what mini-beasts we found. The key came from OPAL who provide citizen science resources. We might choose to send our results off to OPAL so that scientists can see what we discovered about mini-beasts in Sauchie.

We searched 3 different areas of the school grounds:

1. bushes and dry ground- here we found ants, beetles, flies and a worm

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2. edge of the woods- here we found a snail shell (with no snail inside), a worm, a beetle and a golf ball 😉 Santa especially liked the huge worm!

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Santa helped us check the key to help as identify and classify the mini-beasts. DSCN0224 DSCN0225 DSCN0226 DSCN0227

^Some of us were less keen on the worm than others!^

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3. long, damp grass/undergrowth- here we found 2 spiders, a slug, a tiny snail and another beetle

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Unfortunately, we didn’t find as many mini-beasts as we thought we would find. We had a discussion when we went back to class about why this might have been the case. Some of us thought that maybe it wasn’t hot or sunny enough, some thought that it maybe wasn’t damp enough on the ground and others thought that we weren’t looking in the right habitats. We will hopefully get to take Santa out again to see if we can show him some of the other mini-beasts that live in our country. This time, not all of our predictions weren’t right but we had fun having a go at guessing anyway!

Primary 1 Meet Their Panda

Last week, the children in primary 1 at Deerpark had a visit from Mr McGrath from Education Scotland.

Mr McGrath spoke to us about different animals and also introduced us to the word habitat. We learned that a habitat is where an animal lives and that different animals have different habitats. Mr McGrath challenged us to sort different animals into their correct habitats.  Even if we weren’t sure, we tried to work out the answer together as a team by using our communication and problem solving skills.

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Mr McGrath also brought a special visitor with him. He brought a Panda that had travelled all the way from China! The panda was a wee bit shy meeting us all but we told him that he could be part of our class.

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Mr McGrath told us that the panda wants to learn lots of science with our class and he wants to learn all about Scotland as well. We reckon that we can teach the panda lots of new information and we are really looking forward to getting started.

The next day, we learned where China is in the world and how far away from Scotland it is. We compared the two countries using Google Maps. China is a much bigger country than Scotland.

We decided that, since he was a new member of our class, the panda needed a name. We suggested lots of names, but the winning name after our vote was….Santa.!  So, please welcome Santa to primary 1 at Deerpark.