Tag Archives: deerpark

So much friction!

February 22, 2016Deer Parkactive learning, deerpark, forces, friction, primary 1, scienceMiss Yarrow

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.

DSCN1864 — 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.

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!

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.

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.

Pumpkin Science with Santa the Panda

October 30, 2015Deer Park#citizenscience, #opal, #pandareporter, deerpark, Halloween, topical scienceMiss Yarrow

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.

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!

Santa comes Mini-beast hunting

September 9, 2015Deer Park#citizenscience, #opal, deerpark, minibeastsMiss Yarrow

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.

We made predictions about what mini-beasts we thought we would see on our hunt. Santa also though that we might find a centipede!Before 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

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!

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

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

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

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

September 9, 2015Deer Parkdeerpark, panda, scienceMiss Yarrow

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.