Science | Thornton Primary School

British Science Week 2020

Reception

Reception explored their sense of touch using a feely bag and different materials with various textures. They had to guess which material was inside the feely bag using their sense of touch alone.

Year 1

Year 1 investigated rain clouds. They looked at different types of weather across the world and explored how rain clouds are formed. They used shaving foam and blue coloured water to visualise how clouds fill up with water before rain pours onto land.

Year 2

Year 2 have been celebrating the diversity of humans. They have been comparing their weight, height, eye colour, shoe size, hair colour and type, eye sight and whether they can curl their tongue!

Year 3/4

Year 3/4 have experimented with planting beans. They discussed whether beans will grow better inside a greenhouse or in the natural air. They made predictions and used plastic bags to create mini greenhouses in the classroom. We are looking forward to seeing the results!

Year 4/5

Year 4/5 have been researching scientists. First of all they drew their idea of a scientist and then chose a scientist to research using iPads. They then drew pictures of the scientist they had chosen to research and presented some of these in our Science assembly.

Year 6

Year 6 have been investigating recycling. They estimated the percentage of waste from Mr Barton-Harvey’s kitchen which could and could not be recycled. They then sorted the items using the packaging details and produced pie charts to show their findings.

Also, well done to the winners of the homework poster competition! We will be sending them off to the British Science Association in the hope that an entry from Thornton Primary School wins a prize…

This week we had our first robotics club. Children from KS2 were invited to join our club to work in teams to design and program a robot to move over the surface of Mars. Each group will have their robot entered into the national competition.

Year 3 have been exploring the properties of rocks to help to classify them into igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic rocks. We tested the hardness of rocks as well as the permeability. We observed using microscopes to see if the rocks contained crystals.

A comparative test to observe the permeability of soil samples from across the country - Cumbria, Northumberland and Leicestershire. We made our results reliable by using the same amount of water for each soil and made initial observations as well as observations after 5 minutes.

Year 3 made a dissected model to show the layers the Earth then used PicCollage to make a labelled diagram of their model.

Y4/5 and Y6 have spent the Spring term investigating gravity. They started by learning about gravity and its discovery, as well as other forces such as air resistance. They measured different items in Newtons using a force measure. Children then got the chance to design their own parachutes and learnt about how air resistance acts upon parachutes.