We have had some very excited and enthusiastic scientists in our class this week, ready to explore and take on some challenges. Have a look at some of the tasks and activities we took part in!
Floating and Sinking
STEM Challenge - Tin Foil Boat
We had to create a boat from tinfoil that could float. We tested the strength of our boats by seeing how many counters the boats could carry. We had great fun during this activity!
Lava lamp experiment
We explored what happens when you mix oil and water. We found out that oil and water do not mix and oil is less dense than water so it sits on top. We also tested what happens when you add food colouring to water and to oil. To finish, we created 'lava lamps' by mixing, water, oil, food colouring and an Alka Seltzer tablet. The Alka Seltzer reacts with the water to make bubbles of carbon dioxide. The bubbles attach themselves to the blobs of colored water and bring them to the top of the glass. When the bubbles pop the blobs of colored water fall back to the bottom of the glass. We really enjoyed this experiment!
Leak Proof Bag Experiment
This was one of our favourite experiments, simply because when there's a possibility that it could go wrong, it sometimes does and this is always fun when there is water involved!! We found it tricky to poke the pencils through the bag without it leaking the first time we tried it. However, we used our positive thinking skills and practiced having a growth mindset during this experiment. We decided to try it a second time and tried to make some improvements like holding the bag steady, having a sturdy box underneath (just in case!!), making sure our pencils were sharp and that we didn't move the pencils once they were through the plastic, so it didn't tear the bag. We had much more success the 2nd time we tried the experiment. Fantastic work from 2nd class! :)
Coding
Thank you to Ms O’Lone who set up a BeeBot station in our classroom for the last day of Science Week. The boys and girls got straight to work and were very busy writing codes for the BeeBot to follow as well as trying other groups codes too.
We were delighted to have a chance to explore some coding games and activities on ipads this week. We tried out the BeeBot activity, Scratch Jr and LightBot.
Making playdough and Oobleck Slime
We really enjoyed our last activity for science week which was making playdough and oobleck slime. Click on the picture below for a youtube tutorial on how to make it. Have fun!
Lots of messy hands and happy smiles today!