Chestnut Class visit QMC Science Centre
On Tuesday 21st May we visited Queen Mary’s College, Basingstoke to learn more about out science topic: Plants and rocks.
When we arrived, we split into five groups and were allocated to a activity. We worked our way around each activity throughout the day and therefore experienced a range of experiments connected to our topic.
The first activity was building our own flower using various materials. We had learnt all about the different parts of a flower during our science lessons and used this knowledge to build the flowers showing each individual part.
We then had an activity that showed us how water moves through a plant. We used microscopes to examine the stalk and petals of flowers after being in different coloured water for a few hours. We realised that only part of the petals and stem had taken on the colour from the water, giving them a stripped appearance.
Our final experiment connected to plants was looking at seed dispersal.
We looked at many of the different ways in which plants disperse their seeds. We made our own winged seed and practiced scattering paper hole punch circles in front of a fan to see the effect that wind has on parachute seeds such as Dandelions.
We also had two experiments that looked into rocks. The first one looked at how rocks change within water. We had a range of rocks that we looked at to see if, when fully immersed in water, they changed. We discussed why absorbent rocks may not be useful for certain jobs such as building houses.
The second rock activity explored volcanic rocks. We looked at how rocks are formed when a volcano erupts. We explored Pumice and Basalt rocks and then completed an experiment making a model of pumice stone and basalt using baking powder and molten wax.
We had a really good day at QMC and learnt lots more about both plants and rocks.
Click here to find out more about Chestnut Class.
