Space Shuttle launch

We are learning about the Solar System. We found out this week that there is a space shuttle being launched next week. It is called Endeavour and it will be going to the International Space Station.

There is a countdown clock on the NASA website showing how many days, hours, minutes and seconds it is until Endeavour is launched. You can see it here.

"It's like an art gallery in here at the minute"

In Art of the Week on Friday afternoon as looked at 'land art'. All the pictures we looked at were of things made by a man called Richard Shilling.

Some people thought at first that it wasn't art because it was photographs and not "created by a hand" but the rest of the pupils persuaded them that it was art.

We liked them and thought it would be fun to make our own land art. Mrs MacNab said maybe we could make some when we go to the beach next term.

We thought some of the things must have been very difficult to make and must have taken hours!

Solar System

In music we got the last 2 Greek tunes recorded. Mrs MacNab is hoping to put the tunes onto the blog at some point for parents to hear them.

In PE we are still inventing games. Every week Mrs MacNab adds in a new challenge - this week it was a team game again, but it had to be something to do with space.

P3 made a game with 'planets' as targets. Mrs MacNab was very pleased that they remembered which planets were big and small and used big hoops for the big planets and small hoops for the small planets. They did very well with changing the rules so more people could play and had lots of good ideas for making the game easier or more difficult.

P4's game had spacemen in their space rockets (space hoppers) and aliens throwing asteroids (soft balls) at them to capture the space rockets.

At the end everyone played both games and enjoyed them.

In maths some people are doing dividing. They used cubes to help them and they have been sharing things out and making groups.

In topic time we learned about the different layers which make up the Earth. We all made models to help us remember. The layers are inner core, outer core, mantle, crust and atmosphere.

Do you know what each layer is made of?

We did another science experiment. This time we were finding out about gravity.

First we talked about what we thought gravity was.

We had to make sure the experiement was fair, so we had to drop things from the same height at the same time.

We listened to them hitting the tray to see if they landed at the same time.

We found out that gravity pulls things at the same speed even if they are big or small or heavy or light. But very light things like feathers drift around and don't fall straight down. That is because of air resistance.

Mrs MacNab asked what would happen if we did the same experiment on the moon using a hammer and a feather. We had lots of ideas. Most people thought maybe the feather would drift down but the hammer might go up because we didn't think there was any gravity on the moon.

Then we watched a video of men doing that experiment on the moon.

We were very surprised that the feather and the hammer hit the ground together!

Mrs MacNab explained to us why that had happened.

We thought it would be good to go to the moon to do experiements.

On Friday we thought about what we could do to raise money to help the children in Haiti.

You can find out more on the Pupil Council blog here.

In Golden Time some people were making winter pictures.

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

This week we took part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. We counted the birds in the playground and then looked at different ways of displaying the information in charts.

You can read more about it on the Green Swans blog here.