We were very lucky to have Mr Rose come back to visit us again. This time he took the planetarium with him, we enjoyed learning about the stars and constellations. Most of the Primary 4/5s went in the morning and some of us had to go after break with the 6/7s as we are a big class and they don’t have as many in their class. It was great fun and a great way to end our space topic!
Tag Archives: Learning
Space with Mr Rose
Today Mr Rose came in to speak about the last few planets of the solar system. Here are a few more facts for you:
It takes 11 and a half Earth years for Jupiter to go around the sun.
Saturn takes 29 and a half years to go around the sun.
Uranus takes 84 years to go around the sun.
Neptune takes 165 Earth years to go around the sun.
You could fit all of the planets in the solar system in Jupiter.
The smallest star is the same size as 8 Jupiter’s.
It would take 1,000 Earths to fill Jupiter.
It would take 1,000,000 Earths to fill the sun.
1 day on Jupiter is 10 Earth hours
The Great Red spot on Jupiter is a tornado and you could squeeze 3 Earths into it!
Jupiter has 16 satellites and they are named after mythological creatures connected to Zeus.
Saturn has 18 satellites. The Satellite Titan creates a shadow on Saturn.
Uranus has 15 satellites and these are names after characters form Shakespeare.
Neptune has 8 satellites and are named after water goddesses
Burns night
Tonight people all over the world will be celebrating Burns night. We looked at why we celebrate Burns night and who Robert Burns was.
Burns Night is a celebration often held in Scotland around 25th January. It celebrates the life and work of a famous writer named Robert Burns.
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet (25th January 1759 to 21st July 1796) His work is very well known and celebrated worldwide. He wrote his works in both the Scots language and Standard English. He also wrote folk songs which are still enjoyed by many people today, his most famous one is Auld Lang Syne.
On Burns Night, many people have a traditional dinner called Burns Supper. This usually includes eating haggis, which is a traditional Scottish food. It is often served with neeps and tatties. Poems written by Burns are often read aloud too.
Before people start eating their Burns Supper, the Selkirk Grace is often said:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae let the Lord be thankit.
Robert Burns is still very famous today. He has been voted ‘The Greatest Scot’ by the Scottish Public in a survey held by national Scottish television channel, STV.
There is also a Robert Burns Museum which is in the place where Robert was born.
Mr Rose and space
Today Harry Rose came in for our second session on learning about space. Unfortunately the power went off during the presentation so Mr Rose had to talk without having the power point. He did very well to carry on speaking. We are looking forward to seeing the rest of the presentation next week.
Here are some more interesting facts for you:
There are 88 constellations. The most famous constellations are in the Northern Hemisphere. They are mainly named from Greek myths.
You could take a submarine right under the North Pole as it is just water underneath. Unlike the South pole which has land underneath. The highest mountain on earth is underneath Antarctica. We can’t remember what Mr Rose called this.
There is 50,000 tuns of ‘stuff’ that falls from space in 1 year! So earth is getting bigger every time.
Comets are made from stone and ice. The tail that you can see is the ice melting as it is getting closer to the sun. The tail always faces away from the sun as the solar wind blows it away from it.
Meteor showers (shooting stars) is earth going through the tail of a comet.
The closest star next to earth is 43 trillion kilometres away! It would take 4 1/3 years for a message to get there if it was travelling at the speed of light from earth. The speed of light is 300,000, 000 metres per second or 300, 000 kilometres per second. It would take us 7000 years for us to get from earth to the next star.
Mr Rose talks about space
Today Mr Rose came in to talk to us about space. It was very interesting! Here are a few facts we found out:
Barron worked out that 1000 seconds is 16 minutes and 40 seconds. (He worked this out in his head!)
There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy.
We learned a mnemonic to remember the different planets: My Very Elegant Mother Just Spewed Up Nine Pizzas. However this does not include the asteroid belt so he told us of the one he learnt when he was at school: Most Volcanos Erupt Marmalade And Jam Sandwiches Under Normal Pressure. But we like the first one best! 🙂
The sun is about 17-20 million degrees and its not on fire.
The Northern lights happen through the parts coming off the sun and hitting the earths atmosphere.
The planets travel around the sun at different speeds because the closer you are to the sun the less distance you have to travel and the gravitational pull speeds you up. So the closer you are the faster you go. Mr Rose had a powerpoint which showed the speed and direction of the planets orbiting the sun. It was cool to watch.
The half of Mercury that is towards the sun is hot (410 ̊C) and the other half is cold (-170̊C)
You couldn’t live in Venus because you would be suffocated because its mostly made of carbon dioxide, squashed because the weight of the air would crush you, baked because it is the hottest planet at 460̊C and you would dissolve because of another gas which is very powerful. And it stinks!!! Venus is covered in clouds which keep the heat in, this is why it is so hot. A day on Venus is longer than 1 year.
Mars is very cold.
We really enjoyed his visit and look forward to him coming back next week for another session!
Shetland Museum
After Kirsty told us about James Robertson and we looked around the exhibition we got to try drawing a self portrait like James Robertson’s one.
He had a globe painted with him to show he was educated and we think it also shows that he mapped around the world.
We had to think about what we would want the world to know about us. A lot of the boys drew something to do with football or computer games. There were also sports like, hockey and swimming, musical instruments and things we enjoy doing now or would like to do when we are older. We worked really hard on our portraits and coloured them in, some of us did not get them finished before we had our break so Miss Nicholson let us finish them once we had our snack. After our break we got to have a look around the museum which was great as our topic is Shetland. We had to complete a scavenger hunt. We split into 3 groups and worked together to find everything as well as having a look at everything in the museum.
We had great fun!
Halloween
Wednesday
We were busy making Halloween decorations for the Halloween party in the hall at the weekend. We had great fun making lots of different things. Miss Nicholson had lots of activities for us to choose from, she put all the choices on the board and we chose 2 we wanted to do. We could make hanging bats, paper chain ghosts, ghost garlands, witches, spider webs, hanging ghosts and lots more. We tried to make the spiders web out of black bags but they didn’t work so we chose other things. We really liked making the paper chain ghost.
Thursday
We learned French words for a witch, a pumpkin, a ghost, a black cat, a pointy hat, a spider and a skeleton:
See if you can work them out!
- Une sorcièr
- Un chat noir
- Une araignée
- Une citrouille
- Un fantôme
- Un chapeau pointu
- Un squelette
Miss Nicholson put pictures of these things around the room, she would say one of them and we would have to stand next to the picture we thought it was. The first time we did this a few of us got a bit mixed up but once she tried it again we all got them right.
We also got to play a quick game of heads down, thumbs up but in french. Instead you would say: “tête baissée, pouces levés” and to say put your head up is “levez la tête”
After French Miss Nicholson split the class into two groups and gave us the bones of a skeleton and asked us to try and put it back together. We worked really well as a team and it didn’t take us long to put him together again. Both groups did make 1 mistake but it wasn’t a big one. We thought this was fun!
Friday
Today after we watched newsround we took the Halloween quiz. Did you know that the old name for Halloween is Samhain and that people in the middle ages were suspicious of black cats because they thought they were witches?! Hundreds of years ago people thought that ghosts would try to return to their old homes on Halloween so to avoid being recognized by theses ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for other spirits. So this is why we dress up!
We used words associated with Halloween for our spelling activities. We all brainstormed and came up with one to put on the board.
During golden time Miss Nicholson brought in a couple of pumpkins for us to carve. A few of us stayed in the classroom to help. We had great fun working together to create these! Everyone had a shot at scooping out the insides. It was very messy but great! When we were waiting for our turn we designed a face for the pumpkin. Once everyone had drawn something we put them on the floor and we chose 2 that we wanted. Miss Nicholson counted up the votes before she carved them for us. She said a couple of us could take them home if we wanted so we put up our hands to see who wanted them and then used lolly sticks to chose 2 people. This was the fairest way. Colvin and Lucy were the 2 chosen to take them home. 🙂
The start of term 2
We’ve had a busy few days back at school, on Wednesday we watched newsround and discussed what we watched and debated whether we should or shouldn’t have wild animals used for entertainment purposes. We thought if they were being treated fairly and were being looked after then this would be ok as they usually take orphan animals or ones that cannot look after themselves. Then we shared a little of our news with the class before writing about our October holidays in our writing jotters. We had to draw a spooky Halloween picture and write a spooky short story about it. Some of us didn’t get to write the story as we had to go onto our reading. After dinner we made Halloween crafts – we will put another post up to show you all the cool things we made. It was great! On Thursday we had reading and maths in the morning, then music and class PE after break and in the afternoon we had French but this was linked to Halloween which was fun and we had to assemble a skeleton.
Friday 2nd of October
We did Newsround in the morning then we had art. We drew mythological creatures like Medusa and unicorns in Art. After break we did reading. My group read a book called William and the mouse. It was about a boy called William and his friend Hamid who had a pet mouse. We did our spelling test after reading. Before lunch we had Maths. We were doing subtraction. Some of us did a really hard sum. Then we had lunch. It was fish and chips with strawberry crumble. After lunch we did learning logs and some people finished off work. Then it was Golden Time. Some people made phones with paper cups and string. They actually worked!
