On 6th November, Emma Chittick came to P7 to start our renewable energy topic. We talked about the difference between renewable and non renewable energy, saw how turbines generate energy and were given the equipment to make our own turbines.
On Tuesday 17th September, two scientists from the Edinburgh Observatory came to talk to us about space and rockets. They showed us part of one of the Skylark rockets that had been designed in Edinburgh 50 years ago and had been sent into space to take UV images.
We then had an opportunity to make our own rockets. These were launched in the multi-court and some fired right out of the multi-court!
Today, the class were given their next challenge, they had to deliver a ‘baguette ‘ by a driverless car! We used sensors, sound, the front lever to do this. We’ve got quite a few expert engineers now!
On Thursday 15th November, Harry Rose brought the planetarium into school. We had a fantastic morning finding out about the stars, planets, moons and constellations and he told an amazing ancient story about how the constellations were named.
As part of our Plants study we spent time with Mr Rose learning about the classification of plants. We were shown how to use a classification key and given a variety of plants to observe carefully and identify.
We then went outside to look at plants around the school to try and classify them.
P6 have had a great day finding out about air resistance. We looked at videos of Olympic cyclists and saw how much air resistance affects their performances. We read about sports scientists and what they do in their jobs to help sports people achieve better speeds in their races.
In groups, we planned and carried out investigations into ways to change the speed at which objects drop and we watched a video about parachutes.
Today we planned and made things to wear to slow ourselves down, using air resistance. We each made a costume. We timed ourselves running a 50m race normally and then we did it with our costumes on to see how it affected our speed. It did, by between 1-4seconds! Here are some of the photos.
Following on from the Terrific Scientific project, Primary 6/7 made the most of the good weather, to go and make identification sketches of the trees. The trees that we planted a few years ago are growing well. There were lots of birds feeding in the area and bumblebees flying around. We also caught a big ground beetle.
Terrific
Today we took part in our fourth Terrific Scientific investigation. This time we are investigating trees. We have to survey the 🌳 in the school grounds and record how tall they are and the circumference of their trunks. We will then use a carbon calculator to work out how much carbon each tree is storing. We will then calculate the total amount of carbon stored by all the trees in the school and learn about why trees storing carbon is important and where the carbon comes from.
This time we are sending our results to Leeds University and they will analyse the results from all the schools in the U.K.
If you want to see our results so far, you can look online at the Terrific Scientific website. There are lots of other activities on there too that children can do at home. We have also tried the ‘bouncing eggs’, which was a lot of fun.
We had a great session with the Glasgow Science outreach service. They came to teach us about the whole process of digestion from start to finish!
We started with a cream cracker challenge, which showed the importance of saliva. Frankie and Lily Jane just couldn’t get those two crackers eaten in 2 minutes.
We saw how the food we eat gets mushed up in our mouth, stomach and intestines and watched Ms Scanlan catch the end product!!!
