Rock Collecting

Over the school holidays I visited the beach at Clifton in Hawkes Bay. This is a great place to see how rock layers form in the earth. The cliffs are gradually eroding away to reveal the layers of rock. You can also see how the cliff is sinking down at one end.

The rock is sedimentary and is formed as sediment (mud and silt), pebbles and sand are squashed together over millions of years. These rocks would have once been under the sea.
Some of the rock is softer than the rock around it so it is washed away by water more quickly. This forms interesting shapes. This is called weathering.

Making Ice Cream with Science

Today we found out that if you put salt on ice it goes really cold. We used this idea to make some yummy ice cream. If you want to make this ice cream then follow the instructions below.

Putting the vanilla into the bag with the cream and sugar.

The ice cream was really yummy but beware of the salty ice getting in to spoil the taste.

Slime Time

The Year 2 students have been making lots of different mixtures but today's mixture was the best of all.

SLIME!

To make our slime we mixed together PVA glue, food colouring and Borax solution.
We noticed that our ingredients changed a lot when we mixed them. The PVA went from a runny liquid to a lumpy slime and then a spongy ball when we held it in our hands.




Miss Harrison wrote a poem about our Slime! You can read it here.

What is a rainbow?

Have you every looked at a rainbow and wondered our it happens. Well the Year 5 and 6 students at EHS have figured it out.

The light that we see around us looks like white light but really it is made from 7 colours.

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

These are all the colours of the rainbow and form part of the visible light spectrum.

To be able to see these colours the light needs to refract or change direction. This happens when light hits a CD, prism or rainbow glasses. Because each colour travels at a slightly different speed when the light refracts the colours spread out in different directions.

A raindrop acts just like a prism. The sun shines through the rain drops in the air and the light is refracted. As the light changes speed it also changes direction and all the colours spread out for us to see.

When we looked at light through these rainbow glasses we could see all the colours of the rainbow.
Mr Powell took a photo through the glasses and this is what he saw.


We also had a go at making our own water prism by shining a torch at a tilted mirror half in water. We had to persevere to get it to work but we did manage to reflect rainbows on the roof.

The primary colours of light are red, blue and green. Click on the link below to see what happens when you mix coloured lights.

Mixing Coloured Lights

EHS scientists on the front cover

It was pretty exciting this week as the new Education Gazette came out with my photo on the cover.  Here I am with a budding scientist inspecting how our bean plants are growing.

Magic Potion

Hocus Pocus and Abracadabra!

We have a magic potion that changes the colour of other liquids.
The magic potion smelled really bad. Some people thought it smelt like broccoli, cauli flower or cabbage. The people who said cabbage were right. In fact it was red cabbage juice.

Our first job was to use the dropper to carefully put some of the magic potion into each test tube. It was tricky to get the hang of using the dropper.

Next we tested 6 different liquids by squirting some into the magic potion.

Wow - Each liquid turned a different colour!

The things we tested were from right to left:
Baking Soda, Dishwashing Liquid, Lemon Juice, Washing Powder, Vinegar, Window Cleaner.

We thought this was pretty cool.
But then Miss Harrison told us that you can tell if a substance is an acid or a base by the colour it goes when you mix it with cabbage juice.

Red or Pink = Acid
Blue or Green = Base
Purple = Neutral

This was kind of hard to understand but we had fun mixing the potion anyway.