We have been doing further work on Electricity and after discussing electrical safety we wanted to find out how the power came into the school.  We went and found the power pole that had the school transformer on it then worked out where it would come into the building. Evidently the boiler house, it then went to the main fuse box in the cupboard in the corridor.

We dismantled lots of things! We just forgot to photograph them!

We looked at what the inside of a plug and wall socket to see what they looked like.  We opened up some electrical cable to see what the wires were like. We found out that most cables  in our houses are made of copper, but that silver is the best conductor of electricity. We use copper as it is cheaper. After taking apart an old power cable from a laptop we found that it was made of braided steel wire.

We made lots of circuits too, here we are testing our fans.

There was lots of investigative science . We wondered what would happen to a light bulb with a really long and short wire. We thought the short wired one would light up first (spoiler alert – we were wrong) we were amazed to see that it didn’t make a difference. the 3 metre wire and 0.3 metre wire lit up the bulb at exactly the same time.

We then wondered how long a wire would light a bulb from a battery. 3 metres worked… so what about 20 metres? Absolutely no problem at all! (Don’t worry about the table on its side.. it is being used for a STEM project!)

Oh and evidently it was Disco Wednesday.

Registration Week 2024 (youtube.com)

So it is that time of year when we go a little Viking. This year we made some shields and axes. We had to use archaeological research to find ideas for axes, shields and helmets.

In the end we decided on just a shield and an axe, even though we did find some super, cool examples of helmets that have been excavated over the years.

In our research we found that shields could be covered in either linen or leather. They could be decorated so most of us went for this.

A Viking shield was made of wood and had a single hand grip in the middle. The shield boss was made of metal and protected the hand. Most of the original shields found had small holes all around the edge where a leather or rawhide edging was sewn on. You can see our edging on the shields – we didn’t sew it on though!

The most Viking shields ever found at one time were on the Gokstad ship burial where they dug up 64 complete shields. These were painted black and red.

We wanted to check on the tree outside the classroom. Unfortunately after many years of surviving the Winter storms it has been blown over a bit. Mr Renwick is going to check with the Amenity trust to see if it can be saved. While we were out there we took the opportunity to have hot chocolate.

What a lovely day to welcome the children back into 2024.

Today was awesome as 27s’ pod came up the voe and we all managed to get out to see them.

There really cannot be many nursery classrooms that get such a lovely and exciting visitor.

You can find out all about how to identify orca here.  27s’ pod starts on page 58.

We saw lots of different behavior’s  on show.  They had come up the voe to look for seals. We think they may have found one as one of them suddenly started swimming in very tight circles.

Our Tree Diorama

We were asked to make something for a festival of trees, we decided to make a small diorama of a wood.

We came up with some ideas, everyone wanted to do a tree, but also some animals that lived in and around the trees. We wondered what to use for a base. Luckily we found an offcut from a pine plank. This gave us a base to work on but also dictated the size too.

The trees were made from a hanging basket liner and a wooden skewer. We cut the liner into different sized circles and then glued them to the skewer.

We spray painted the trees black. This helped us make shadows as well as make them more rigid. Once the paint was dry we covered the trees in PVA and water with a drop of washing up liquid to help break up the surface tension. When they were soaked through we sprinkled on the dark green flock. When the trees were dry we sprayed them with hair spray to seal the flock on.

We then drew out our design on the board and built up the hills with offcuts of polystyrene. We covered everything in Sculptamould. We made a depression for the stream when it was still wet. We then painted the ground brown.

We decided where the trees were going to go and then made holes to take them. We then covered the ground with PVA glue and sprinkled on lots of different flock. We made sure we didn’t touch the stream as we wanted it to have water in. The stream had a darker colour painted on and then small stones and grit were glued on.

Mr. Renwick printed us animals and birds. Everyone painted something. The trees were glued into their holes and then the animals and birds were stuck onto the scene.

We then got Mr. Renwick to add the resin into the stream area.

Our final task was to add all the tufts to look more like long grass and reeds.