Category: Calderwood Curriculum

Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan have been learning about COP26 together, finding out what it stands for, what it is, why it is happening, and what it means for us and have been learning about climate change with Miss Christie in our STEM lessons.  Through our learning, we wanted to explore climate change even further.

Today, Ness, Rannoch and Tay clan were visited by Miss Connor, our RAISE Primary Science Development Officer in West Lothian, who gave us an introduction to the science behind climate change.

We discussed what the words climate and climate change meant and why climate change is happening.  We then looked more deeply into greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, learning about the links between CO2 and climate change.

Following this discussion, we all carried out an experiment to see if we ‘could see CO2’.   After making predictions of what we might see happening in the experiment, we added sugar to a test tube of warm water and mixed it till the sugar had dissolved.  We then added some yeast to the mixture before, finally, placing a balloon over the top of the test tube.  We waited for approximately 10 minutes to see what might happen.  We found that the balloon inflated, showing that a gas had been created.  This helped us to understand how carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and trapped, causing the planet to become warmer.   We really enjoyed carrying out the experiment and checking our predictions.

After completing the experiment, we discussed why climate change matters to us and what we can do to help.  We look forward to looking deeper into this in the coming weeks.  Thank you so much to Miss Connor for allowing us to learn and think more about climate change.

#WL_STEM