The Kings Copse Boat Show!

We all know about the Southampton Boat Show! Well, Year 6 decided to have a little show of their own. We decided to use our scientific skills to investigate how to design a boat that can hold increasing amounts of weight. Which group would design a boat that could hold the most passengers (marbles) without sinking?

Here are some of our designs....

   

          

Congratulations to Aiden and Oscar who managed to get 28 passengers on to their boat before it sank! This was their winning design! Why was their boat so successful? Add your thoughts below!

Floating challenge!

Once again, we've been busy researching and testing the science behind why boats and objects float in water. We quickly discovered that a ball of plasticine will sink in water. It's weight is focused in small amount of space. Because the ball has a small surface area, the upthrust acting upon the ball was unable to push it back up to the surface. Gravity was more powerful than the uphrust so it sank!

 

We were then set a challenge.... using the same ball of plasticine, could we change the shape to make it float? There was a vast array of designs and some were more successful than others!

 

Some tried creating shapes that had pocket of air inside them. Sadly, there wasn't enough to keep them afloat!

 

Others tried making holes to try and trap air. However, the plasticine was so compacted that the air was pushed out of the shape and it sank as the water pushed through.

 

This group tried using a leaf shape as they knew leaves floated on water. Sadly, the water splashed over the sides and made it heavier so it sank!



There were other ideas from our knowledge of the world too - some groups tried using raft designs and fish because they knew they could float in water. However, they didn't quite work!

 

Success! Rosie and Chaithanya's flower design and Morgan's bowl shape were the first to float! They manage to make the force of gravity and upthrust BALANCED.



 

Today the class created their own weaving designs with paper varying the weft and warp strips. 

They came up with some super designs.

Colour Work

The children have been very busy thinking about colour over the past week.  This has linked in with our literacy work about Elmer and also into our topic work.

The children have made these super self portraits by collaging coloured paper onto card!
They have also been busy mixing colours and making colour patterns.
 

Story telling

Today in year one we have been sequencing and retelling the story of Elmer. We have thought about using story language and the order that the events happen in the story. Can you retell the story at home? Can you use story language in your retelling?

Picture sequencing.

Some of the children used picture cards to order and retell the story
and then created their own picture maps.

 

Castles.

We have been inventing our own fantasy castles. We have been looking at the detailed castle drawings in this book.

 

 

There are all sorts of castles- flying castles, underwater castles, musical castles etc. We loved looking at the inventive ideas!

 

We decided to create our own and write about our magical castle.

 

The Crown Castle- by Louis

The food castle- by Alex

 

The Cake Castle- by Olivia

The Flower Castle- by Sophie

 

 

Learning about shapes.

In maths this week, Year 4 have been learning about 2D shapes. We have learnt the names of all the 2D shapes and have been investigating their properties.

Hexagon maths group investigated quadrilaterals. They used the pin boards and elastic bands to make as many different types of quadrilaterals as they could. They then took photographs of them on the Ipad and printed them. The children then had to sort the quadrilaterals into groups and see if they could name them.

Here are some photographs of their work.

 

 The children started to sort them out- square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezium, parallelogram

Some of our finished castles!

 

Here they are!