Light, shadows and colour

SCIENCE WEEK
To link in with the whole school exciting science focus Little Conkers were little scientists this week! 
The huge dark tent has been very popular as the children have armed themselves with torches and giggled with delight, entering the dark dark space and investigating sparkly objects hanging from the ceiling as well as mirrors and a range of items on the light table.

 The arrival of a quaint old overhead projector (before the days of digital projectors!) stimulated much discussion. One child thought it might be a time machine!!

Together the children worked out where the switch was and that it needed to be plugged in to work. And then the fun began!

"I'm big!"... "Whose arm is that?"... "My shadow is waving!"

      

 Shadow puppets was fun but it took the children some time to work out how to keep their own shadow out of the way and just display the puppet shadows.

We posed some questions - Does everything look bigger on the screen? Why do things look bigger? Why do some things look grey and other things show their actual colour?

 How can you make your shadow even bigger?

 The addition of rainbow blocks created more opportunities to explore, as well as pose for the camera!

 It was very pleasing to watch children talking to each other as well as observing the effects they could achieve. "I've got an idea!" was heard frequently, followed by blocks being moved around and other children commenting on what had changed.

Observing light shining on and through objects captured the children's interest. Sometimes there was silence as they studied and thought about what was happening. 

Our week has been full of children observing, thinking, trying things out, having ideas and adapting them as well as predicting outcomes.

We're hoping the sun will shine next week so that we can use these coloured blocks outdoors and explore the effects of natural light!

As you can see, we did manage to create some colourful effects with bubbles outdoors!

Little Conkers exploring and learning

EXPLORING POWDER PAINT MIXING

The children are familiar with paint colour mixing, and some often choose to do this. This week powder paints were available to explore. There were some great observations about how the powder looked and how it changed when water was added. One child even asked questions about melting and dissolving!

The changes in consistency also fascinated the children. Vocabulary such as thicker, runny, liquid, watery, lumpy was used.

STRAWBERRY PICKING AND TASTING!

The children have been checking the growth of the strawberries ever since they spotted the flowers some weeks ago. This week red strawberries were noticed and everyone gathered around excitedly!

The children picked the ripe strawberries. Then it was indoors to wash and to taste them! 

The children noticed someone had eaten parts of some of the strawberries already! They thought it could have caterpillars, bugs, worms or birds - maybe next year we need to set up a camera to see who visits our garden when we are not there! 

PEPPERS!

Just after we had tasted the strawberries, the fruit scheme monitors came in with bags of peppers for snack time. This was the first time we had had these and the children were very curious about them! An ideal opportunity to compare fruits and vegetables!

Did they look, smell, taste the same as the strawberries? What would they look like inside? 

The children loved the crunch sound as I cut the peppers!

                                              

Later on in the week we had sugar snap peas for snack time - the children were again fascinated by them and asked lots of questions as they enjoyed them.

WHAT'S GROWING?

In our garden we spotted some pea pods growing on our plants - some of the children excitedly told us they had pods on the pea plants they had been growing at home.

It has been a great experience for the children to observe the growth of our potato, pea and strawberry plants over the last couple of months.

 We went to see the allotment on our school field which has been set up and tended by the gardening club. We were amazed by how much was growing.
We talked about the names of the vegetables,and compared the leaves, flowers and heights of them with what was growing in our garden. The children thought the name "runner beans" was highly amusing, as well as "chilli peppers"! 

GROWING SKILLS

The children have been focusing on their pencil control skills this week and is so pleasing to see them practising and developing all the time.