Downshall Primary School

Children in Reception explored 'Sneaky Shadows'. Children discussed how shadows were made outside, exploring their own shadows and the shadows of other objects. They also explored how shadows can be made with other sources of light inside, by creating puppets and using torches.

Year 1 completing the 'Changing apples' activity for Science Week. We started by exploring different types of apples and discussing the different, sizes and colours. We then cut the apples into slices and tasted the different apples. "My favourite was the Pink Lady apple. it is so sweet and crunchy" Kiyan 1O said. We then placed the cores into ziplock bags and observed the changes. Over the course of the week, the children were able to see the cores change: "The cores are changing colour. They are turning brown and look old" Miguel 1O said.

In Year 2, children explored the life cycle and metamorphosis of a pond frog through games. The aim was to go through the life stages of a frog before becoming a frogspawn again. The game ended when the first player has completed a life cycle or players can sit out when they become frogspawn and wait for others to finish. Zaynab - 'I really liked pretending to be a frog' Haseeb - 'The frogspawn are the eggs of frogs and they turn into tadpoles.' Maryam - 'I liked turning into a tadpole and then hopping around to be a frog. 

For Science week, Year 3, children explored ‘reaction times.’ The purpose was to see how long it takes someone to respond to a catching a ruler once it as dropped. The children could see that the ruler has been dropped, and how the eyes send a signal to your brain which processes the information and starts a response by sending a signal to your hand and arm muscles, which tells them to catch the ruler. The children were very slow at catching the ruler first, but the more they repeated it they found their response time was quicker. Aaira 3k ‘There is always a slight delay between noticing something and your body reacting to it.’

In year 4, children made their own bubble mixture. I'm not sure why it did not work as the bubbles popped quickly.  We could try adding more sugar to the mixture next time and observe the changes.  (Khadija 4A) The bubbles experiment was so much fun and it was mind blowing to see the bubbles stay intact and stick to the cloth.  Next time, we should try to make larger bubble makers and see if it still works.  (Karun 4B) I predicted that the bubbles wouldn't burst and would stay on the cloth.  I thought this because the sugar takes away some of the chemicals which make the bubbles thin.  Ayaan 4K.

In Year 5, we conducted a few exciting experiments relating to time.

The first experiment was 'Water Clocks', this experiment allowed us to use a timer to measure a volume of water running through a small hole.

The second experiment was 'Pendulum Patterns', this experiment required us to pull a weight at various heights and make links between gravity and the force of friction.

We found that people in ancient times used to use different devices to measure time. Water clocks work by collecting water at a constant flow rate into or out of a marked container. We created out own water clocks which last for 5 minutes. This is so useful because now I can time how quickly I can do different things without a stopwatch! – Yusra 5U

In Year 6, children investigated the temperature and humidity in their classroom.

Abdur Rahim said, ‘To prepare for this Science Week activity, we recorded the morning and afternoon temperatures in our classroom over a week. We also recorded the morning and afternoon humidity in our classroom over the same period.

We then drew two-line graphs based on the data we collected. Two patterns I could see in our data was that morning temperatures always were lower than afternoon temperatures and that humidity was always higher in the morning than in the afternoon.

If we continued to record this data, I predict that the afternoon temperatures will stay higher than the morning temperatures, though both sets of temperatures should increase as we enter spring and summer. I also predict that humidity will increase in the morning as we are exiting winter and moving into spring.’

Sulaiman said, ‘We recorded these two measurements over 2 weeks and then we plotted the data on a line graph. We interpreted the line graph and wrote our observations and conclusions. I noticed that when the temperature increases there is a decrease in humidity. This could be because the warmer temperature causes the water in the atmosphere to evaporate quicker.’

“There’s lots of experiments which we can test out and different ingredients you need to make a science experiment” – Manha (5SH).

“I like it because we test out theories and find out if they’re true or false. We find out big ideas linked to topics. We do cool experiments and know what will happen in the future. It tells us what will go through when we grow up” – Samit (6O).

“Science is interactive and we can look at what we’re learning about. We enjoy doing experiments because it’s fun. We enjoy researching different things on laptops. We get to test different things. I get to learn new things every day”- Muhammad-Ibrahim (5S).