Our school community garden is taking shape. Each classroom has its own raised bed. All pupils planted seeds and we had a debate as to whether or not we should go organic. The motion to grow organically won and we are also looking forward to welcoming some hens to school in the coming days.

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We had great fun making Halloween Slime in First & Second Class today!

First we measured out 100ml of PVA glue and poured it into a bowl.

Then we mixed in a few drops of food colouring and some glitter.

Next we added some bicarbonate of soda

We mixed it well and added in some contact lenses solution to bring all the slime together

We worked the slime using our hands, pushing and pulling it together until it formed Slime that we could play with.

We had great fun seeing how far we could stretch our slime out!

We had great fun in First and Second Class last week for Science Week.

We created our own Lava Lamps and Fizz Inflators and we had a fun Zoom Meeting with “The Exploration Dome” https://explorationdome.ie/

We have been very busy here in first, second and third class in Gortskehy with Science and Engineering lately.

We sowed seeds in the classroom. First class sowed cress, second class sowed runner beans and third class sowed baby carrots. We are having great fun watching these grow.

We completed a project on The Leaning Tower of Pisa and we learned lots of interesting facts. We learned that it is a Romanesque building, and that poor foundations caused it to lean. It was designed by engineers. It is a huge tourist attraction and over 1 million people visit it every year. We used our Chromebooks to create a slide show in pairs. We cast our projects to the board and we enjoyed looking at each others work. We created our own version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in art class using match sticks and cotton buds.

We have some big Manchester United supporters here in Gortskehy! We recently looked into the Munich Air Crash for history. It  was a terrible event for Man United. We worked as journalists and wrote newspaper articles about the tragedy. We wrote about the slippery runway and how the aircraft had difficulty taking off, resulting in the accident. We learned that Sir Bobby Charlton survived the accident and played many more matches for Man United. We worked in groups and created a presentation on our Chromebooks and we shared it on the board. Finally, we put our engineering hats on and created models of the aircraft using recycled materials and our imaginations!

During Engineers Week (March 2nd-8th 2019), we put our engineering hats on again! We used our imagination and our knowledge of the world and how things are made to create 3-D drawings. We had to think practically and use our problem solving skills to create these structures. We made everything from baby play gyms, to playgrounds, to underground drills, to water-parks, and lots more wonderful things.

We really enjoyed our recent work as engineers in the middle room. It allowed us to develop our creativity and problem solving skills. We had to share our ideas and work together as a team to come up with our amazing creations. We really enjoyed using the Chromebooks to create our projects and loved incorporating technology into our learning.

Who knows, we may have the next budding engineer in our midst here in Gortskehy – Watch this space!

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A snapshot of rang 1-3 at work