The Amazing Ark!

 

 

 

The children were given their new challenge this week!

 

 

 

Can you build a windproof, waterproof ark? The ark must be able to hold 3 toy animals….and still float!

 

 

 

A very exciting challenge…..but first of all, we had to find out what on earth an ark is!

 

 

 

Ellen was able to tell us about Noah and the Ark, and we had a look at the Bible today to read the story. We found out that a Bible is a book that has lots of stories, and lots of the stories are about God or Jesus. The Bible is a special book for Christian people.

 

 

 

We also had great fun watching this Donald Duck cartoon that tells the story of the ark!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In writing, we had an exciting lesson where we invented our own animals! We used our imaginations to pretend that we were famous explorers that had made an amazing discovery. We picked two of our favourite animals and joined them together, then used interesting ADJECTIVES to help us write.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning to Draw Animals

 

 

 

Today, in handwriting, we learned how to use charcoal and to paint with drawing pens! We enjoyed this so much, that we thought we could make some animals pictures for the wall.

 

 

 

First, we followed instructions to draw animals. Mrs Jamieson showed us on the board and we practised using our little whiteboards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The results were very impressive!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we each chose an animal to draw and followed the instructions. We drew one animal using charcoal and the other using black drawing pen and water. We made pairs of animals to put on a Noah’s Ark display on the wall. What do you think?

 

 

 

Learning Areas

 

 

 

Some children have been bringing in toys and puzzles for us to play with in Learning Areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re having great fun learning about Noah’s Ark, but we need to start thinking about making our own…….

 

Thursday, 3rd March

 

Now we all know that an ark is a big boat, we thought we should get started on building one! But first, we needed to find out what “WATERPROOF” means, so Mrs Jamieson helped us to set up an EXPERIMENT.

 

We wanted to find out which materials we could use to help us build a waterproof ark. This is what we did.

 

1. First, Mrs Jamieson showed us how to use a pipette. We needed to be able to use one for our experiment, so we had a practise.

 

2. Next, we laid different materials onto our whiteboards. We used tinfoil, baking paper, kitchen roll, wadding, sugar paper and a piece of black bag.

 

3. Mandy put a few drops of food colouring into the water for us so that it would be easier to see when we did our experiment.

 

4. We put some coloured water onto each of the different materials with the pipette. We waited a little while to see what would happen.

 

We found out that the water soaked through the sugar paper, kitchen roll and the wadding, so these materials were NOT WATERPROOF.

 

The water lay on top of the tinfoil, baking paper and bin bag, so these materials WERE WATERPROOF.

 

We had so much fun doing this experiment, that the children were very keen to do more….so we looked on you tube for some ideas! They really liked this video and asked me to put it on the website! Maybe this is something you could try at home? Let us know how you got on!

 

 

29.03.11
We are really running behind schedule for this challenge, so we are going to have to work really hard over the next 2 weeks! Thankyou to everyone who has sent in some “junk” for us to use when we make our models later in the week.
Riley certainly has been thinking about this challenge because she has already made an ark at home! She brought it in to show us, but had to take it home again to add the finishing touches! She is going to bring it back in to test to see if it is waterproof and windproof!

 

 

01.04.11

 

Yesterday and today, we have been very busy working with our Talking Partner to build our ark. Thank you to everyone who brought in junk for us to use! We had to make sure that 3 animals could fit into our ark and that it had a roof. We decided to use tinfoil to help us make our arks waterproof. We are going to test out arks next week!

 

 

04.04.11

 

This week, we have been busy testing our arks. First, we made a checklist to help us.

 

• Did you work well with your partner?
• Is there a roof on your ark?
• Can 3 animals fit into your ark?
• Is your ark windproof?
• Is your ark waterproof?

 

We had to show another pair of children the roof on our ark and how the animals fitted in . They decided of we could have a pink tick or a green cross on our checklist!

 

Next, Mrs Jamieson helped us test to see if your arks were windproof using the hairdryer, If anything blew off, they weren’t! Luckily, most of the arks passed the test.

The last thing to do was to take our arks outside and por water over them. The watering can was very heavy, so Mrs Jamieson did that part for us.

We left our arks for half an hour, then went back for a closer look.

We decided that if the insode of the ark was soaking wet or soggy, our ark was not waterproof. The most successful arks were the ones that were covered in tinfoil….because tinfoil is waterproof!

We decided to recycle the arks so we can make more models after the holidays….some were a bit too wet and soggy to take home in schoolbags!

This has been a great challenge….we can’t wait for the next one!