Pond Dipping at Stocks Wood

We had a fabulous time pond dipping and classifying living things at Stocks Wood.

Revising and revisiting our knowledge of electricity 

Derwentwater have enjoying getting the electrical equipment out and polish up their electrical knowledge. They reminding themselves what all the component’s symbols are to record the circuits they built in their science books. They’ve practiced their science skills by investigating what happens when more and more components are added to their circuits and enjoyed observing static electricity. 

Light

Our topic on light has allowed for some great investigations and modelling to take place.  We’ve been observing how prisms refract the light so that we can see a rainbow, revising shadows. We’ve tried to model how light travels in straight line and investigate the angles of incidence and angle of reflection as well as using light meters to measure the reflectivity of different surfaces. We’ve had a busy time in our science lessons and the topics not even over yet, we’re hoping to make some periscopes! 🤗

Investigating how we grow and change

Over the last few weeks we’ve been learning about how we change as we get older, we decided we’d like to investigate how we change as we get older and chose to investigate arm spans. Last week we collected the arm spans of some children from each class and noticed that: the older the children were then larger their arm span.  This week we decided to go one step further and investigate if out heights were linked to our arm span, our results weren’t conclusive but we did notice that the taller children tended to have a longer arm span.  We had to think about how to make it a fair test and we had lots of fun predicting, measuring and recording our findings.

Acids and Alkalis 

During our taster morning at Beacon Hill, we had a Science lesson investigating whether different liquids were acids or alkalis. We had to use a pipette to drop each liquid into the tray then dipped litmus paper in it. The paper changed colour depending on whether it was an acid or alkali. We checked the colour against a PH scale, if it was dark red it was a strong acid, if it was purple it was a strong alkali. If the liquid was neutral, it was green. 

Chester and Liverpool Residential

Derwentwater invited the Y4’s to join them on their residential to Chester and Liverpool and we all had a fabulous time.  Our first stop was at Chester Zoo, it was wonderful to see all the animals. 

It was a fantastic opportunity to see how well all the animals are adapted to their environments, it was a great way to bring to life our current science topic, Evolution and Inheritance. There were loads of posters around the zoo which helped us observe all the different ways the animals are adapted to their environment.  We were also able to observe the animals ourselves and notice what all the animals have in common comparing this to the work of Charles Darwin who presented the world with the Theory of Evolution. 

This was enhanced with our visit to The World Museum in Liverpool where we were able to explore their dinosaur and fossil exhibit where we could see their exhibit of fossils and replicas of dinosaurs based on fossil finds and how they help us understand the world before the existence of humans and how we learn about evolution and can see the adaptations living things have made over millions of years.  We had a great time.

Mini Beast hunting at Siddick Pond

Derwentwater had a fabulous day with Crummock yesterday at Siddick Pond, so many of them had visited Asda before and never ventured beyond the car park to find such a wealth of nature. The children explored the area with the assistance of Rheghan the nature ranger to discover and delve under the surface to discover all the micro habitat living right under their noses.  The children were blessed with wonderful weather to explore and ignite their interest in all things mini-beast and discovered so much wildlife as you can see from the pictures below.  We all had the most amazing day exploring.

Revising, revisiting and building upon our knowledge of plants

We dissected some daffodils to remind ourselves about plants, revising their parts and how they reproduce. 

Y5 Science Morning at Beacon Hill

Y5 joined pupils from schools within our cluster group on Thursday 9th March. The children used microscopes to examine the cells found within an onion slice. They then labelled the different parts of the cell and the microscope. 

Forces

Forces workshop with Sellafield

Catherine from Sellafield came in to help us with our work on forces, in particular friction. We used newton meters and our scale reading skills to measure the amount of force needed on different surfaces to move our shoes. We discovered that the different surfaces create different amount of friction depending on how rough or smooth they are.

Investigating pulleys and using newton meters

We enjoyed trying to investigate how mechanisms including levers and pulleys can allow a smaller force to have a greater effect.

Water resistance investigation

Hypothosis: Can we make the same size piece of tinfoil sink and float by changing its shape?
And if we get the tinfoil to float, whose will hold the most marbles without sinking 🤔

We had great fun investigating and predicting which tinfoil boats would hold the most marbles and we were surprised at how hard it was to get the tinfoil to sink!

Air resistance investigators 

Continuing our work on forces this week we’ve been investigating air resistance and what we could do to make our balloon rocket more aerodynamic so that it would be able to travel further along the string. We succeeded by giving our balloon a light cone shaped nose and the balloon travelled nearly a meter further. 🤗

Derwentwater’s first science of 2023 was all about forces and friction; we enjoyed investigating how oil can be used as a lubricant to reduce friction. We compared which cube of jelly was the easiest to move using the pencils as chopsticks; one jelly cube had oil on it and the other didn’t. We realised that sometimes friction can be an advantage and sometimes it’s not. We finished with a little fun and got into teams to see who could move all the oiled jelly cubes the fastest 🤗

A bit of fun to finish to see who could moved the oiled cubes the quickest 🤗

Living things and their environment 

Derwentwater have been learning about Living things and their habitats over this half term, part of which we've been looking at micro-organisms.  As part of our work we looked at yeast, investigating if it is a living thing.  They discovered that the yeast was able to feed on sugar and produce carbon dioxide.  We were able to catch the gas in a balloon and watch it fill it up.  We took a time laps video while we are observing what happened. 

Ourselves and other animals

Derwentwater Class enjoyed drawing an enlarged image of the human circularatory system onto the playground.  It needed to be large enough that they could walk around it and follow the journey that blood takes as it travels around our bodies.  This helped them understand why blood is important to us, why we need it and how it works.

Dissecting hearts 

As part of Derwentwater's science work, we've been learning about The Circulatory System, thanks to Mrs Thorpe (Our Chair of Governors) who is a science teacher she helped us explore and dissect the hearts. The children started off a little apprehensively but quickly most children became enthusiastic and curious to find out more.  It was a superb science session and we learnt loads.