Our rocket morning

We had a wonderful rocket morning.

We set up our room yesterday.  Everyone was responsible for a table on which there was a space item.  We each had to talk about this item with our parents, visitors and other visiting classes.

Our parents came to see, other classes came to see and our principal Mrs. Coleman came to see.

At different intervals throughout the morning teacher rang the bell, the visiting children sat on the floor and the visiting adults moved to the sides of the room for various demonstrations.

We had demonstrations on:

how to launch straw rockets

how to launch elastic foam rockets

how to launch a stomp rocket

how to launch the snowman rocket

how to make a volcano

how craters are formed and how dinosaurs died

how to launch a fizzy rocket 

how gravity causes objects to fall

how to launch balloon rockets

The last part of our rocket morning involved launching the big air and water rockets in the yard outside.  The whole school came to see this.  It was soooooo exciting!

We lost our two water rockets.  After several goes both rocket landed on the roof.  Mike our long suffering caretaker has already rescued one and will rescue the other one some time when he gets a longer ladder!

What a wonderful morning.

Well done to all in Ms. McLoughlin's, Ms. Coade's and Ms. Geraghty's classes for the wonderful rocket morning!

Slideshows of our rocket morning/open day

Open day invitation tomorrow

Some wonderful space films

Have a look at some of the wonderful movies on space (and all other science and geography topics) that we have been watching in class.

Click on the picture to begin:

Our failed vinegar rockets

We had high hopes for our new vinegar rocket but look what happened!

Learning about gravity

What makes a feather fall to the ground if you drop it?

GRAVITY!

Gravity pulls everything to the ground.

We tried to answer a few questions:

Will gravity pull a feather or a piece of paper to the ground faster?

(It looks like it pulls the feather faster but maybe that is just that the paper gets caught on air currents)

Which will fall faster, a flat piece of paper or a feather?  Watch closely for the answer:

Which will fall faster, a piece of flat paper or a piece of crumpled paper?

(It depends on how you hold the flat paper, in our test they fell together, but sometimes the air currents catch the flat paper causing it to slow down).

Will a full bottle of water fall faster than an empty bottle of water?

(No, they will fall at exactly the same time because although the force of gravity is stronger on the heavier object, the heavier object is more inert and will take a greater force to get it moving.

  This is why both objects of unequal weight will fall at exactly the same time.)

Which will fall faster, a hammer or a feather?

(The hammer, because it doesn't float on the air)

If you tried this on the moon what would happen?

(Have a look at this ACTUAL experiment on the moon!)

Here's a version done in a vacuum chamber:

Homemade rockets

Here are some rockets we made at home.

They look great!

Astronaut display

We are making an astronaut display.

We each had to fill in the details and colours on our astronaut to add it to the space background.

Fizzy rockets

We know that real rockets use fuel to blast off to space.

We used fizzy tablets with water to create our own rocket fuel.

We filled the canister one third full of water, added a fizzy tablet and counted backwards from 10.

The rocket explosions were so thrilling!

Have a look for yourself:

Ops, didn't manage to capture it on video this time!

Here's what happened in Ms. O'Connor's class:

Fizzy Rocket Experiment!

Countdown 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1.....lift off!!