Science Week in Oak Class

This week has been totally Science-tastic!!!      Every day, there has been lots of science to help us cover our planned topic of Light and to do random exciting science fun too.

Each day at the start of the morning and afternoon sessions, we have done a WOW experiment and in order to link in with our writing focus of diary writing, we have kept a Science Diary to record our experiences, thoughts and learning. The class have really enjoyed the experiments and learnt/refreshed their learning of some scientific concepts.

Here is a list of all the experiments we have done this week:

• Elephants Toothpaste
• Tea-bag Rockets
• Non-Newtonian Fluids (Corn starch and water aka Oobleck)
• Magic Water
• Pencils through a bag of water
• Skittle Rainbows
• Dry Tissues
• Dancing Ping Pong Ball
• Spider Racing (not quite the Cheltenham Gold Cup but close and topical!!)

The theme of Science Week is Growing, so alongside all of this, we have set up a longer term experiment to investigate whether seeds need light to germinate. We worked scientifically making predictions, recording results and managing the variables to ensure it was a fair test. We put them in 3 different conditions; full light, half light and darkness. We checked our results on Wednesday and Friday and will look again on Monday. Our final conclusions will then be made - so watch out for the results in next week's blog.

On Friday,whilst dressed in red for Comic Relief, we added a variety of living things to a glass of 100ml of water containing food colouring to see if we could see how they used water. The food colour didn't seem to be working very well so we swapped it for ink. By the end of the afternoon the celery and the daffodil had definitely got a pink tinge!!

The highlight of the day was VIP scientist who came to demonstrate some cutting edge technology - a brain controlled drone. Mr Wight gave us a totally fascinating and mesmerising talk on the science behind this technology and 5 children (who were specially chosen for their star science performances this week) had a go at trying out the drone. It was EXCELLENT!! One of our Star Scientists managed take off, spun it left and right and landed it safely all through the power of thought - HOW TOTALLY AMAZING!! All the children successfully controlled the drone and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

In addition to all of this we did lots of practical science demonstrating how we see and how light travels with light sources, string and a cuddly toy. We had fun in the sunshine creating shadows and making multiple shadows. Our finale of the week was a shadow puppet show in which the children showed off their creative and scientific skills all in one task. They were fabulous! We also tracked the shadow of the netball post on the playground and noticed that over time they moved and got longer. Lots of science knowledge learnt today!

What a lot of fun - let's hope next week is just as much fun too.