Sunday 31 May 2015

Weekend in the Pic du Midi

This  weekend I went to the Pic du Midi. I was sleeping on Saturday there.


There are very big telescopes. The telescope domes can move. I moved one dome.





We saw the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. We saw it in a little telescope and a big telescope.
 It was very cold and all the mauntains were full of snow.


Thursday 28 May 2015

Investigating Viscosity

Today we did another investigation about the viscosity of different liquids. 

Last time we dropped a marble into the liquids, but we found that timing accurately was really difficult because the marble fell through some of the liquids very quickly.

We talked about how we could change the investigation, perhaps gaining more accurate results.  One of our ideas was to use a lighter object as we thought that it would travel through the liquid more slowly.

So, we have tested our prediction using a dice instead of a marble.

Here are some photos



We took turns pouring liquids, dropping the dice, timing the fall and taking photographs.

Here are some videos of us doing our Science work:

Here is a table of 4Bs results.  You can see the difference in the timings between dropping the marble and the dice.


We calculated that the dice fell about 3 times slower in thicker liquids like shower gel and washing up liquid but took about twice the time to fall through thinner liquids like oil, lemonade and orange!  We are still discussing the milk result... Why is it 3 times (it is thin like water)?  Did we test this accurately enough?

Whatever our decision about the milk, in Year 4 we have concluded that lighter objects fall slower than heavier objects through all liquids.

(We didn't test the ketchup because the marble is still sitting on top of the liquid after the first investigation - so we knew a lighter one would not be any different!)

Monday 25 May 2015

kirby clay collection


This weekend my mum bought me some rainbow coloured plasticine. At first I had no idea what to make, until I decided to make a Kirby collection. My collection includes Kirby (of course) Waddle dee (Kirby's best friend) Meta Knite (Kirby's arch rival) Claycia (a giant hand with one eye that wants to steal all the worlds colour) an M tomato, a set of cherries, a pineapple, a milk carton and some grapes.

Wednesday 20 May 2015

Same difference

Mr Gregg held up two Cuisenaire rods and said, "can you find two other Cuisenaire rods with the same difference?"

Then, "can you find other pairs with the same difference?"
We thought there would be an infinite set of these, but here are some of the ones we made:
We talked about what written subtraction sentences these represent.
Samyak and Marie made a really good mathematical claim about these.
And there were plenty more things we noticed in 4B:
Just about all of us thought Marie and Samyak's claim was true, so afterwards we did some drawing and writing to explain why we thought so. Here's some examples:

... and a slideshow:

4B code.org games

4B have been making code.org games.  (4B: you can log on to do this again here.)
Not all of them work perfectly yet, but here they are:


Javier
Sebastian
Eban
Chloe
Vanisha
JamesP
Lucia
Glyn
Leonie
Kayla
Angiolina
Shriya
Imogen
Macy
Andres
Olivia
Jaime
If you make any other games, post the link in the comments below!

LATEST NEWS
Sebastian has made a great game at home. Here it is!

Monday 18 May 2015

Function machines

We've been looking at function machines. You put a number in at one end, something is done to  the number, and, usually, a different number comes out at the other end. It wasn't quite like that the first time we tried it though,,,

 
We had a few more goes using our expensive and sophisticated Year 4 function machine:
Then we tried it out in pairs, making up our own functions:
Tomorrow we'll try some more two-step funtions, and maybe use this online function machine too:

Health and sport week


As part of IST’s health and sports week, today we had a climbing wall installed in the playground, each class had the chance to climb!





 
Javier and James were natural spidermen, they made it all the way to the top.

Macy too was a star climber, she made it to the top!… The rest of 4B all put in a huge effort, most of the class making it at least half way up the extremely high wall! Well done to everyone.