Woodland art.

This afternoon we went outside and collected lots of little bits of twigs, leaves, seeds, grass, flowers and berries so that we could make collages out of natural materials.

We looked at some photographs of woodland scenes and talked with our learning partners about all the things we could see; the colours, the shadows, all the different textures, and then we tried to match them with the materials that we had collected.

We showed great perseverance gluing all the tiny bits in to place.

Here are a few of the creations.

Brandon used ivy leaves for the ground, and dry leaves for clouds, with  grass used for rain.
He also used some heather and conifer cuttings to make trees.

Jada created a flower using a twig for the stem and rosemary sprigs for leaves, with heather flowers used as petals.
She also made a small fairy... can you spot it?

Caitlin created 'The house in the middle of the woods' with an ornate door and leafy windows.
Fluffy cotton seeds look like clouds in the sky.

We are so proud of all our collages!

We'll post some more photographs soon... when they are all dry!

We reviewed our work at the end of the day... here are some of the comments:

"They are all different!"
"I like how they've used twigs like tree trunks"
"I like how all the flowers make it look detailed!"

Little Kingdoms

After finishing our Circus topic, Mr Littlewood went for a walk trying to thing of what we could do next.  Suddenly, he saw something amazing!

We wondered what they might be... fireflies, stars, pixies, fairies, butterflies?  When we looked closer at the shapes we decided that they must be fairies!

Then, Mr Littlewood showed us something else that he found... a tiny set of fairy wings!

Tiny fairy wings next to a real penny!

We passed the wings around, they were really delicate.  We think a fairy must have lost them.

Fairy hunting

We wanted to see if we could find some fairies in our nature garden.  We thought that they might be quite shy though, and maybe only come out at night, so we decided to write some notes.

Emily came up with a really good point!  If we write our messages on paper they'd be too heavy for the fairies to pick up... so after deciding what to write by building our sentences on whiteboards, we wrote our messages on the tiniest post it notes we could find.  It took a lot of concentration on our fine motor skills to write in really tiny letters, and of course we had to remember our capital letters and full stops!

Then, we went hunting, looking for clues in the garden such as collections of twigs or leaves, crevices in tree bark and hiding places under stones.

Is this a door knocker on a tree?

Checking inside the bird houses.

Deciding where to leave messages.

A message stuck near some cracks in the bark.

Flea Circus comes to town.

As a bit of a treat at the end of our circus topic, Poppy's dad brought in his flea circus and gave a little show.     We saw little fleas called George and Henrietta perform tricks on the tight rope, trapeze, flea cannon ball, diving in to a pool of water, playing football and pulling a carriage around the ring.  It was great fun!

Scooter day.

More forces at work in year 1 today as we brought our scooters in to school.  A special circuit was set up in the yard that required us to use different forces to affect the motion of our scooters.  After completing the circuits we talked about how slopes, gravity, the playground surface, and all the bends that we had to steer around had an effect on our journey around the course.

Earlier in the week we had been learning about road safety.  We made some excellent posters to remind people about road safety.

(images pending, check back soon)

Finding the difference.

This week in maths we have been doing some really tricky number work.  We have been learning to find the difference between two numbers by counting on, and also finding how many fewer one number is than another, by counting back.

We know it is important to learn this skill so that we can tell the difference between the values of our Skylander Giant's powers, so that we can tell how many fewer seats need putting out for school dinners than for sandwiches, and to help us play games like dominoes.

Circus investigation number 3: The tight rope

In our final investigation we wanted to find out which would be the best type of rope to do a tight rope walk on.  With all the work we'd been doing on forces and motion, we've learnt about pushing, pulling, twisting, sliding, gravity, motion and friction.

As it would be too difficult and dangerous to do tight rope walking in school, we did an investigation with balloon rockets to find out which type of rope caused the most friction, and would therefore be easier to grip on to with your feet.

As with all our investigations we made predictions.  This time it was really difficult.  There was coarse white string that we use in class, some fuzzy wool, and some really smooth cotton. A lot of us predicted that the fuzzy wool would provide the greatest friction.

"I think the wool because it has got all bits of it"
"the wull bicoz its reely tickly"

However... when we tested it out we found out something completely different!

The first rocket in this video is the coarse string, and the second is the wool.

As you can see, the balloon rocket on the wool shot all the way to the end, because there was less friction affecting the motion of the rocket.  The air pushed the rocket all the way along the wool.  However the coarse string caused that much friction that it slowed the balloon rocket down and made it stop at about half way.

Circus Investigation Number 2: Dumbo's Ears.

Carrying on with our science investigations on forces, we watched a clip of Dumbo flying. We had a chat with our learning partners about how he can fly and 'popcorn'ed some ideas.

"He's got a magic feather"
"But in the end he doesn't need it"
"He flaps his ears and can fly"
"His ears are like wings"

With a bit more chat realised that gravity was trying to pull Dumbo down, and somehow he used his ears to slow down his fall.

We wanted to find out whether if Dumbo had smaller ears, would he fall to the ground quicker.... time to investigate.

We used gyrocopters to do this experiment.  The blades were Dumbo's ears, the body was his trunk, and the paper clip was the magic feather.

We made an orange 'control' gyrocopter, and then made white gyrocopters with our chosen variant   Some of us chopped Dumbo's ears shorter... or chopped one off completely!  Some added more magic feather paperclips to the end of his trunk.  The important thing was that we only changed one thing.

Testing that our control gyrocopters work.

We drop both at the same time and see which one falls the fastest.

We wrote up our investigations, including the predictions and the results.

What we found out...

If we added weight to the gyrocopter = it dropped quicker than the control 'copter

If we shortened the 'ears' = it dropped quicker than the control 'copter

If we chopped one 'ear' off = it dropped quicker than the control 'copter

At the end of the lesson we had found many ways for speeding up the fall of the gyrocopter, but hadn't found a way of slowing it down.... so we had a think.

Some suggestions were:

"Make the ears longer"

"Make the trunk longer"

"Take the paperclip off"

Do you think any of these things would work?  Why not try it out at home?