Discovery Science – Step 3 – Engineering Week 2017

One of the children’s engineering challenges for the week was to make slime! To do this, they mixed half a cup of water with half a cup of PVA glue and stirred. Next they mixed a teaspoon of Borax powder with a cup of water. This and a few drops of green food colouring were stirred into the mixture! See the gooey results for yourself 🙂

Discovery Science – Step 1 – Make a Lava Lamp

To complete this experiment the children had to figure out what the capacity of the bottle was using a measuring jug. They then had to quarter fill the bottle with water and figure out what two-thirds of the bottle’s total capacity was. They added this amount of vegetable oil to the water with 12 drops of food colouring. They broke the Alka-Seltzer into 4 parts and added them one by one, observing the effects. The children learned that the chemical energy from the Alka-Seltzer reacted with the water and produced carbon dioxide gas; which in turn tried to escape from the top.

 

Discovery Science – Step 1 – Heritage in Schools

Martina Butler visited our school on the 27th of February. The senior classroom learned about pollination and pollinators. They investigated if our garden was a pollinator-friendly garden which indeed it is. In our garden, we have long grasses, wild flowers, pots with herbs, flowers that have grown from bulbs and flowering trees. All of which prove very alluring to the buzzing bees! 

Guzzler and the polar bear taught the junior classroom about energy consumption and what can done to use less energy.

Stepping Back in Time

Children took their great grandaunt’s 100 year old copybook to school today! In it, she did her arithmetic and wrote about topics such as honesty, patriotism, the blessedness of toil, war and  the seasons. In a piece titled “Gratitude”, she wrote… “Gratitude is a virtue giving us an inward sense and an outward expression of thankfulness for benefits obtained”.  What a joy it was to read about Ireland in the early 1900s!