Willie Wonka's new Drink!

Today Mr Willie Wonka asked Room 13 if we could help him out...

Good Morning! As you know, at my factory we make the most scrumdididdlumptious, fandabuloso chocolate products that the world has ever seen. However, recently I have noticed how boring the drinks are that are available. So I wanted to branch out into the drinks market and make the most fizzy-whizzy super-duper drink that the world has ever seen and that I would be proud to put my name on. 

Unfortunately, my Oompa Loompas have all come down with a rotten cold and so cannot work! Therefore, if you would be so kind, I would like you to help me! 

What you need to do is make a drink that is 500ml in total and uses 5 different ingredients, all of which I have kindly provided for you!

                     

In our groups we had to plan how much of each ingredient we would use to create our drink, making sure that it totalled 500ml. Then we carefully measured our ingredients. Two of the groups were very accurate with exactly 500ml and two other groups were very close to 500ml. Finally we tasted our fizzy-whizzy, super-duper drink and it was scrumdididdlumptious! All but two children would definitely buy the drinks if Willie Wonka decided to manufacture them! 

Science

Today we did some some experiments to find the pH of tap water. Then we added some different substances to the water and used pH paper strips to test to see whether they were acidic or alkali. The paper strips went orangey red if they were acidic and bluey purple if they were alkali. We observed whether it made any difference if we added more of the substance to the water. Finally we added more than one type of substance to the water to see what happened. We were careful and didn't use any harmful substances that wouldn't be safe.

Choir Time!

Congratulations to our wonderful Year 3 and 4 children on their performance tonight!  It was so great to hear you all sing so beautifully and to see so many smiling faces - from the children and the parents!  Well done!

Science - Dissolving

In small groups we devised our own investigation to find out if substances dissolved in water. First we had to make a prediction. I thought the orange raro would mix in with the water and make an orange drink and it did! I thought that the citric acid would bubble up. When I watched what happened I could see that most of it dissolved into the water and it just made small bubbles. I thought the baking soda would make condensation on the cups sides. When I added the baking soda to the water it mainly dissolved into the water and it didn't make condensation, but it made the water go a cloudy white colour.                                                                                                              
                                                                                                         By Bailey

We created our own science investigation booklet to record what we did and what we found out.

Floating and Salty Water

Today we looked at an atlas showing the Dead Sea and thought of some reasons why it might be called the Dead Sea. Then looked at some images and could see people floating in the water reading their newspaper. There was also lots of salt dried up on the beach.

We decided to carry out an investigation to see whether salt helped things to float in the water. First we planned our investigation thinking about what things we needed and how we would carry it out. In order to make the test fair we knew that the only thing we could change was the salt.
Whilst trying to carry out a fair test we came across a few problems particularly with the shape of our plasticine and also some of the salt stayed at the bottom of our container and didn't dissolve into the water.

When we analysed our results we couldn't be sure that the salt made a difference. Next time we would make sure that we had a really good plasticine shape to start with, that wasn't too thin and wouldn't end up leaking. Some of us thought that the salt might dissolve better in hot water, whilst others thought that cold water might be better as the Dead Sea would probably be cold. This is something we may look to investigate next week

Book Olympics

Book Week is so exciting!  Today we had a book read to us by another teacher as part of the "Read Around", we heard a book being read on the Oak Tree Radio Station and we took part in the Book Olympics.  This was SO much fun!  Sven and Eve were our "runners". They had to go to the hall and get the questions based on books, then run them back to us so that we could read and answer them! We knew a lot of the answers but had all our laptops going so we could google some of the hard ones!  We were so knowledgable on books that we came third in the middle school!  Well done Room 13!

Eve and Sven holding our winning prize!

Author Visit

Today we were lucky to have Craig Smith, the author of Wonkey Donkey, visit our school. He has written many fantastic children's books and all his stories could be sung to music, so there was lots of audience participation.

In the afternoon Zac from Christchurch Libraries read some stories to the year 3/4 classes and introduced us to some new books that can be found on the library shelves.

Book Character Parade

What an amazing bunch of characters we had in Room 13 today! Dalmations, Hairy Maclary, Fancy Nancy, Harry Potter, Mr Cheerful, witches and wizards were just some of the characters who arrived at school today.

Look how fantastic all of Room 13 looks in the photo below.

Floating and Sinking

As part of our water inquiry we used plastine to create shapes that would float and sink. First we looked at which shapes sunk quickly. Then we created shapes that floated and tried to adapt our model so that it would also carry a load.

 

Our challenge was to devise a shape that would float and be able to hold the most 10 cent coins. We had to keep improving upon our design to increase the number of coins our plastine shape could hold without sinking.

The winners of the challenge were Lily and Ashley whose shape managed to float whilst holding fifteen 10 cent coins.

Book Week

Next week is Book week!  Come to school MONDAY dressed as a favourite book character.  Bring the book your character is in to share with the class.

We are going to be looking at Hairy Maclary books, Dr Seuss books and Eric Carle books - have you got some you can bring to share? If so, name them and bring them in on Monday!

Charlie love his RUGBY!

Look who Mrs Brown saw at Linfield Park on Saturday!  Charlie played Mrs Brown's son in the Under 9 competition!  Here he is with Tom from Year 4 - you guys are such great sports!

The BIG Meltdown

Last week, we arrived at school to find the most amazing "ice sculptures" around the school! The innovative teachers of St Albans had been up early putting out lot of weird and wonderful ice shapes to get us thinking about how they were made and what wold happen to them!  Here are some of the things we saw!

Riley wrote this wonderful piece to recount what we saw....

What! What is this ice doing here?  I ran over to some ice and started kicking it  around like other people were doing.  When the bell rang, we ran into class and then went  outside and saw ice with action cards, ice with maths jellybeans in it, ice that was egg shaped, ice that was green, blue, orange, yellow and read and ice that was bauble like and had a string to hold it up like a decoration on a Christmas tree.  Mrs Brown told us to think about how the ice was made.  i thought it was made by moulds but it was made by frozen in balloons.  We found one with action cards in it but the teacher said we could not because it belongs to someone else.  Finally we saw frozen hands with food colouring in them.  They were freezing cold.  Then we went back into the classroom.

Water and the Weather

In class we carried out an experiment to see if we could create a cloud.

 

For this experiment, you will need :
A clear glass or container, some warm water, some ice and a metal dish. 

1. Place the ice on the metal dish and wait until the dish becomes very cold.
2
2. Pour some warm water into the clear container and then place the metal dish on top of the container. 


3. Inside, you should see a ‘cloud’ form near the top of the container as the warm water vapour, cooled by the ice, condenses.

The Water Cycle

This week we have been learning about 'The Water Cycle'. Check out some new links on the right hand side of the Blog for some cool activities, clips and a song about the water cycle.

Winter Walk!

Last week we went on our Winter Walk to Malvern Park.  Here are some of the photos that we took!