Science Week 2024
We have really enjoyed celebrating Science week! At Southwick, we do a lot of work and learning about Space. So, for Science week, we decided to stick with the theme of space and had a whole school focus on Mars. Take a look at what we’ve all been up to.
Reception
We have discussed the order of the planets, the surface of Mars and also what the weather is like there. We talked about the similarities between Earth and Mars and looked at how close they are to each other. We looked at the rovers that landed on Mars, looking for life and discussed what it might be like to live in space. We then shared all of our ideas and made a ‘Mars’ planet in a tuff tray, then designed a poster to tell people all about the ‘Red Planet’. We had great fun learning about Mars!
Year 1
Year 2
We looked at the story of the 3 little aliens and the big bad robot and thought about how we could make the alien’s space rovers better for living on mars. We looked at structures and used our 3d shape knowledge from maths to build some new ones. The children tested the strength of these by adding in extra joins and support where needed. Some of us took our structures home to finish and this activity went on for nearly two hours in school. The perseverance was amazing!
Year 3
Year 4
Year 4 were given samples of soil from Mars to investigate if Mars had ever sustained life. We inspected each sample closely before making a prediction as to which sample could contain life. We recapped the 7 life processes too. We gave the soils water, then food and then water and food together-we were shocked at our findings and are going to let NASA know what we discovered!
Year 5 and 6
Today we were space engineers. We worked together to build a pulley machine that could hook and carry the containers of Mars soil up to a testing area. We then tested the two samples to look for possible signs of life. We did this by adding warm water to each one, sufficient to cover the sample then stirred and looked for bubbles. We found that it was sample ‘A’ that bubbled.
Bubbles could be a sign that living things are there but they could also be due to a chemical reaction
