Snow closures and science

It was a funny week last week. Some days we were at school as usual, one day school was closed because of the snow, and one day school got shut early and we all got home to play in the snow! Even the teachers.

In school we were getting on with our work. Here we are doing spelling and using the dictionary to help us.

In drama we were role playing lots of different scenes (scenarios) where we had to show what we thought would happen next. Then everyone talked about whether the characters had acted in a good way or whether they could have done things better. This helps us to try to respond appropriately to other people.

We got some new games for the smartboard - they're VCOP games and we're really enjoying them. We've only played 2 so far but there's lots more we can try. This one is Victor Van Cleef the Punctuation Thief.

On Wednesday Mrs MacNab took us outside to do music. We loved it! We recorded lots of different sounds that we could hear or make in the snow.

We went into the courtyard to listen to find out if the sounds here were the same as the sounds at the front of the school. It was very peaceful in the courtyard. If we were very quiet we could hear birds singing. We saw a starling on the roof. When we listened carefully and concentrated hard we realised the snow made a different sound when we walked in the courtyard than when we walked on the grass.
Do you know why that was?

We did some science outside too. We looked at people's shadows. They were very long.

We went back outside later and looked at our shadows again. They had changed. We're going to be thinking about this more over the next few weeks as part of our Solar System topic.

We did some other science too. Here we are doing an experiment to try to find out why rockets have to carry oxygen as well as fuel. The oxygen isn't just for the astronauts to breathe - the engine needs oxygen too.

Did you know that? Do you know why?