This week, we have been celebrating Science and Engineering Week at St Vincent’s.
As part of this, we were lucky to have Aveea in to lead some science workshops for us. The theme of this week is ‘time’. Prem spoke to us in assembly about chemical reactions and we looked at making a rocket. He used white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda but unfortunately, the reaction started immediately. He challenged us to think of ways that we could slow down this reaction. When Prem came to our class to make our rockets, we first had to trace shapes to create decorations so that our cannisters looked more like rockets. This took us quite a while and we found it difficult to cut along the lines that we had drawn! After this, we had to assemble our pieces around the cannister using celotape (which may have proved fatal for some of our rockets). After they were ready, we put a spoon of sodium bicarbonate into a piece of paper and rolled this up to create a little parcel. Once we had our rockets and our parcels, we went downstairs to the courtyard to see if we had been able to successfully slow down the reaction to see our rocket take-off!
Prem and Miss Forster Adams filled our cannisters up half way with vinegar and then dropped in the parcels of sodium bicarbonate. They they had to secure the lid and shake it so as to start the reaction. Some of our rockets took a little while to react and ended up popping on Prem! Some of them had tape within the cannister so it was impossible to secure them properly, which meant that the vinegar escaped and the reaction could not take place (we’ll blame our teacher for this though). Some of our rockets were so successful though! They shot so far into the air which you can see from our pictures, really took us by surprise. We had to wear protective goggles too! We had such a fantastic time during this workshop and would like to say a big thank you to Aveea and Miss Carruthers for organising this opportunity for us.
In our lesson, we were tasked with finding out which material would be best to make Elastagirl new super suit. Our first job was to make predictions about the materials and we had to make a sensible guess as to which material would be most stretchy. We were going to be testing toilet roll, tinfoil, sandwich bags and clingfilm. We then tested the materials and ranked them based on stretchiness to decide which material Elastagirl should make her super suit out of. We decided that clingfilm was the most stretchy and therefore the best for her suit!
We love science in Year 2 and really love the opportunity to think scientifically!
What was your favourite part of this week and why?
