Three Dimensional Shapes and Their Nets

Today we were investigating 3D shapes. The children used Polydron to make shapes including cubes, cuboid and square based pyramids and were able to deconstruct the shapes to see the nets.

Plants to dye for!

Today we started a new experiment where we put white flowers in different dyes to see how this would affect the plant.

Plants and what they need to grow: our findings

We conducted our experiment over 21 days and during that period we measured the height of our seedlings every week to see how their growth was affected by the different level of water, light, air, soil, space and warmth.

Each group took 3 measurements and then drew bar charts to show the results in a more easily identifiable form.

This group looked at how warmth, or the lack of it, affected the growth of the plants:

You can clearly see in the graph below that on the final week of the experiment the plant with no warmth grew least and the plant with most warmth grew most.

The next group looked at the importance of air.

These findings show that by day 21 lack of air has adversely affected the seedling whereas the seedling with the most air has grown the tallest.

The following group looked at water.

These findings show that the seedling without water had shrunk in size by day 21 but the seedling with plenty of water - perhaps too much, had grown by day 21 but not as much as the seedling with only some water.

Our scientific approach clearly showed how the plants were affected and our bar charts were very helpful in showing the results in an easily understandable way.

We had an interesting discussion about this in class and also about the difficulties in conducting experiments in a scientific manner. For example, the seedling with no warmth was stored in the fridge - but this meant that it was also without light. Did this affect the results? Something to think about.

What do plants need to survive?

Today we set up experiments to prove what plants need to grow. 

In class Mrs Waller helped us to work out six variables that plants need:

Water

Air

Soil

Heat

Light

Space

We discussed how to prove that these variables were essential for growth and decided to plant three carrot seedlings for each variable, giving each seedling differing amounts of that variable. For instance, the group that was testing for the necessity for water would plant one seedling with no water, one with a little water to keep the soil moist and one with lots of water.

We measured the height of the seedlings at the beginning of the experiment and labelled each one to show the variable we were measuring and the height in centimetres.

Here we are preparing the pots:

We will report back at the end of this half term with our findings.

The perimeter of a paper bag (Thursday April 27th 2017)

We have been looking at the difference between area and perimeter this week and today we put our learning into practice by making a paper bag with a perimeter of 1m. This means that the side of the bag had to measure a total of 1 metre all the way around the edges.

Here are some examples to inspire us...

Here we are, work in progress...this challenge was trickier than it seemed at first!

Here are some completed bags. But did the perimeter measure 1m?

What worked best - trial and error or careful planning? Have a go and see what you think!