Time for some scientific fun!

Young and older pupils, joined by their parents, had the school buzzing with scientific fun for British Science Week. Under the theme ‘Time’, teachers invited families to take part in a range of entertaining and educational activities.
Whoops of delight were heard from our Galaxy class as children investigated the chemical reaction between acid and bicarbonate of soda. They also held a competition to see who could make the biggest bubble tower. At the end of a great day, children took home the pots of sunflower seeds they had planted to keep a diary of how plants grow.
In our DSP unit, children learned about lifecycles, studying how humans get older and finding out how eggs transform into larvae which in turn transform into pupae which finally transform into adult butterflies.
Nursery and Reception children observed the lifecycle of a butterfly too, with parents being invited for the great flight-off when the newly hatched butterflies were set free. Reception children also enjoyed a great day out at Leicester Botanic Garden where they explored exotic plants in the hothouse and took a dip in a pond to observe the types of minibeast that lurk beneath the surface.
Year 1 children and their parents took part in a number of activities to celebrate British Science Week:  pupils did a magic flower experiment where they folded flowers on water and watched them open up again on their own; they made cornflour slime to observe what happened when they moved their hands through the slime quickly and slowly; and they used the Funnybones storybook to build a skeleton.
By making a seasons wheel, Year 2 pupils had the opportunity to explore the cyclical nature of how their environment changes with each passing season. This activity invited our budding meteorologists to consider seasonal and daily weather patterns and how the passing seasons affect our daily lives.  
The children In Year 3 examined the lifecycle of a sunflower and set up an observational experiment to monitor the growth of their sunflower over a four-week period. Parents were invited to help children plant their seeds. Pupils then took their plant pots home for the sunflowers to start growing over the holiday and for them to continue their observations.
In Year 4, some wobbly wonderkids made and tested jelly recipes. They learned that jelly sets over time and investigated different methods for preparing jelly that slows down the setting process.
Meanwhile, next door in Year 5, pupils were investigating reversible and irreversible reactions by making a glove inflate from the gas produced by a chemical reaction.
In Year 6, pupils were left in the dark as they experimented with the length of shadows. By moving the light source closer to and farther away from the object, in a fair-test investigation, they observed how the length of the shadow changed.

Click on photo to watch a slideshow of the activities done for Science Week

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