Years 2 and 3 have been surveying the school field and discovered that there is a lot more than just grass out there. Of course there are daisies and dandelions and but we also found white clover, buttercup, speedwell, chickweed, thistle, cranesbill, greater plantain and common vetch. What a fantastic ecosystem our field actually is when you look closely!

Year 2 having been exploring how to use a microscope today. We looked at some everyday items such as coins and newspaper while we got used to positioning and focussing on our Petri dishes before getting to look at some more exciting things such as dead insects, sand grains and Dr Fishwick’s tie. We found the beautiful grains of sugar particularly fascinating as they looked like “huge blocks of sparkling ice”. 

We will be using the microscopes again, as part of our plants topic, in order at look closely at seeds, leaves, flowers and stems.

Dr Boeckx came to talk to us today about what a doctor does. She brought in lots of things that doctors use. 

We made chromatography butterflies today. We started by marking coloured dots with felt tip pens. Then we put the bottom of the paper in a shallow tray of water and watched the water soak up the paper. We were amazed as the colours seemed to “melt” and spread upwards. Some of the colours even changed – the brown spread out in to blue and orange for example. We noticed that our patterns were the same on both wings.

We’ve got some visitors down in Early Years as some tadpoles have come to stay. We’re going to watch them carefully over the next few weeks to see what happens to them…

Strange yellow containers of a brown, powdery material have been appearing on window sills throughout the school. It can only mean one thing… summer is finally here and everyone has started growing seeds! In Years 1 and 2, along with Language Base 1, the children have planted marigolds while LB1 have also planted sunflowers along with Language Base 2 and Year 3. We hope to plant these outside later in the year and we chose both flowers as they are beneficial to wildlife, providing nectar for butterflies and bees and a source of seeds for birds in the autumn.

We’ve been designing, building and testing fan boats this week. We had to think about making them float, the weight distribution so that they didn’t tip over, the electrical circuit to connect the motor and waterproofing the wiring. We had a lot of fun putting our scientific knowledge to practical use.

After finding out about fossil hunter Mary Anning, Year 3 spent the afternoon excavating for fossils. We had lots of fun carefully and patiently scraping away the rock to reveal the fossil hidden inside. Afterwards, we measured some dinosaur footprints and used this measurement to estimate the size of the dinosaur that made them.

Prospective astronauts from Year 4 enjoyed a fantastic evening at Space Camp. Rain stopped us from stargazing but we made planispheres and constellation cards to help us find the stars whenever we want. The trainees also went through testing to analyse their communication and memory skills as well as measuring their pulse rates before and after exercise. 

After hot chocolate we then settled down to camp “out” in the hall in our tents. Everyone had a brilliant time and passed with flying colours.

Nursery enjoyed discovering that at the top of Jasper’s beanstalk was outer space. An alien egg was found having landed in Nursery. Maybe it fell from our beanstalk? We did mark making in our rockets, made fluffy and fizzy paint which we used to create planets and painted aliens. We also explored how we could package alien eggs to work out how the egg  landed safely.