AN ASTEROID HITS THE SURFACE OF THE MOON

I watched a television programme all about space called "The Sky At Night". There were real scientists and astronomers talking about the stars and planets. In this episode they were talking about the Moon. They did an experiment to show what happened when an ASTEROID hit the moon billions of years ago. This is why there are craters and patterns on the moon. There are two different types of rock on the Moon. There is the old rock which is white and was formed when the Moon was formed when a giant asteroid crashed into the Earth. The new rock is which is dark formed from volcanic eruptions that happened afterwards. It is made from lava that has become hard. Bright craters are newer craters and are made when asteroids crash into the dark rock and expose the white rock beneath it. This is what we demonstrated with the experiment. Dark craters are old craters that have been filled with lava.

I am putting a layer of flour to be the old light rock and then sprinkling over a layer of cocoa powder to be the new dark rock.

The asteroid is about to hit the surface of the Moon!

Yeah! A brilliant crater!

It has even made rays, which is where the rock fires off across the Moon in lines. You can see these on the Moon too.

Sometimes experiments do not work first time! I did not use enough flour the first time. It was not deep enough!

RAINBOWS ON THE DOOR!

I was in the living room and I saw two rainbow patterns on the door. I was amazed and did not know how they got there. I now know that light bounces of things that reflect and sometimes the colours that are in the light that we can't normally see get separated into the rainbow colours. The light bounced off the mirror in the living room. When rainbows are made, the light from the sun bounces off the raindrops which are like billions of tiny mirrors.

HOW DO BIRDS FLY?

I am often wondering about this. I asked Mummy the other day, "Why is it that birds can fly when there is gravity?" It was good to read about it in my Usborne Pocket Scientist book. I learned that it is the shape of the birds wing that helps it to fly. The shape is called an AEROFOIL. The way the air goes over and under this shapes helps the bird to lift off the ground.

We tried an experiment. We made an aerofoil shape and hung it from a piece of cotton. We then blew across the top to see if it would move upwards. It didn't actually work but I did get an idea of what should happen. We watched a funny clip on YouTube all about aerofoils.

CRYSTAL ROPE

I am doing an experiment to see if I can grow a line of crystals along a piece of wool. I put 6 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda in two jars of hot water. I weighed down the wool with two paperclips. The wool will soak up the mixture and hopefully in a week's time there will be lots of crystals along the wool. I am excited to see what happens.

MY SOLAR SYSTEM MODEL

I am making a model of the solar system to hang in my bedroom. I will look up and see the sun and the planets above me. I am making them out of papier mache and paint. I am not sure how I will make the rings of Saturn yet. It will be amazing!

THE DAY I MET A REAL SCIENTIST AT THE THINK TANK

We went to a home ed day at the Think Tank in Birmingham and had a brilliant day. Mummy and I did a trail around the zoology section. We saw fossils of an ancient deer, an ancient crocodile and a triceratops. There were lots of stuffed animals. There were two huia birds that are both extinct, which is very sad. People used to kill them so they could wear their pretty feathers.

We then went to see a film on the big screen in the IMax. It was about penguins. It was amazing. We saw the Mummy and Daddy penguin look after their egg and their chick. It was funny when the chick lost its fluffy coat. I liked the elephant seals when they were yawning and making rude noises!

We did a workshop all about light. We made shadow shows and found things that glow in the dark.

We saw lots of old things like bicycles, trams, airplanes, cogs and wheels. We also played in the new science garden until it rained.

My favourite bit was the Cauldron Chemistry show. A wizard showed us how he could pass his magician's exams using science instead of magic. It was fun to watch him make potions and explosions. At the end of the show Mummy and I spoke to the wizard and we said hello to his friend who is a REAL scientist! His name is Ben and he is a paleobiologist! I have written about meeting him ....

 

DINOSAUR FOSSILS AT NEW WALK MUSEUM LEICESTER

I love dinosaurs and have been looking at lots of books about them. My favourite dinosaur is the Gigantosaurus. We went to the New Walk museum in Leicester with our cousin Margaret and saw lots of dinosaur fossils. There was a huge model of a dinosaur that lived in Leicestershire millions of years ago. It was a bit like a brontosaurus. There were also lots of rocks and crystals to look at. I saw some amazing ones from different parts of the world.  I bought a bag of pretty crystals from the museum shop. We also saw some devil's toenails like I found in Drakes Broughton.

AIR PRESSURE IS AMAZING

We did an experiment to find out how bubbles of air can make this float and sink in water. The force that makes this happen inside the bubble is called air pressure. In our experiment we filled a bottle with water and put a diver inside it. We made the diver from a plastic bag and attached it to a paperclip. The diver was supposed to sink when the bottle was squeezed and float when it was not squeezed. Unfortunately, this did not work. My diver just got stuck upside down. We are not sure why this happened. It is a mystery!

The next experiment we did worked much better. I screwed up a piece of paper and put it in the bottom of a glass. I filled up the washing bowl with water and then turned the glass upside down and put it in the water. You will never believe it, but the paper stayed completely dry! This is because the air inside the glass pushed up against the paper and kept it dry. Amazing!

 

 

We then did another amazing experiment. We filled a glass of water and put a piece of card underneath it. When we turned the glass of water upside down, the card stuck to it. Even though the water is really heavy it did not fall down! The reason this happens is because the pressure of the air pushing underneath the card is stronger than the pressure of the water to break the seal around the glass.



THE GREAT ASTRONOMER GALILEO

I went to see a storyteller at the Worcester Beeline festival. He told us all about the story of the astronomer Galileo who was the first person to discover that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around. We also learned how the Moon travels around the Earth and how the shadow of the Earth makes us see the Moon differently during the month. It was fun pretending to be Galileo's students and to find out that he went to prison for making such amazing discoveries. Some people were scared by his ideas.

CRYSTALS

We made some crystals. We had lots of fun making them. We had sugar and water. We mixed it together it the sugar DISSOLVED. It means that when we mixed the sugar in, the sugar has to disappear. It is still in the water, but it is liquidy. Instead of being grainy and hard, it is liquidy. A couple of weeks it was allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll crystals because the liquid had EVAPORATED and left behind the hard sugar crystals. We tried to get it out of the pot, but we could not get it out, so we used a knife and I ate the bits. It was sticky, crunchy and sweet. What's next? We looked at the crystals under the magnifying glass and they looked amaaaaaaziiiiing! They were JAGGEDY and BUMPY. The surfaces of the crystals were SHARP and FLAT. My favourite crystal in my crystal book is calle BLUE GREEN SMITHSONITE. It can be found in the United States, Australia, Greece, Italy, Mexico and Namibia.

 

 

FOSSIL HUNTER

I am a fossil hunter just like Mary Anning who found the first dinosaur bones ever 200 years ago. It is amaaazzzing what I have found near our house in Drakes Broughton. It all started when Ed found a Devil's Toenail in our garden. A Devil's Toenail is what people used to call a fossil called a GRYPHAEA. A gryphaea is a creature that lived 200 MILLION YEARS AGO when the dinosaurs lived on the Earth. It looked a bit like an oyster. It is now EXTINCT.

Ed told us where he used to find lots of gryphaeas when he was a boy. He told us to look near the fishing pond. Daddy and I went fossil hunting. We took tools like hand forks, trowels, knives and a hammer. I felt like a real PALEONTOLOGIST. We found lots of gryphaeas.

When Mummy, Libby and I went to pick blackberries I started to look for fossils on the farmer's track. I found this amazing fossil. There are lots of tiny fossil shells in this piece of rock and there is also something that looks like a fly.

 

 

MICROSCOPE

I am very excited to have my new microscope. It is amazing to see things really closely. These are the things I have examined so far:

PLANT CELLS
I have looked at the skin of an onion and seen the CELLS. Inside each cell is a NUCLEUS.

CREATURES
You have to cut the things you see under a microscope really really small and they have to be a bit see through. I found a wasp and cut a tiny piece of its wing off and looked at it. Ed brought us a sample of pond water from his pond. We saw some little tiny creatures scooting about under the microscope. We couldn't see them when we just looked with our eyes. Amaaaaazzzzing!


CRYSTALS

I also looked at CRYSTALS. I love crystals and like finding them on the ground. Under my microscope I looked at two different types of sand, salt crystals and sand crystals. I could see the flat and square shapes of the crystals.

Me collecting sand samples

MY LABORATORY

I love science! I have turned my bedroom into a lab. I have a blackboard for writing ideas and my experiments. I have science books, a specimen box, a microscope and a magnifying glass. I am going to do lots of experiments in my lab.

MAGNETISM

We are doing science with magnets!

We fished fish to see if the fish were magnetic. They were magnetic because we used a magnetic fishing rod to fish them. We did not think the magnets would work in the water. They did!!!


















We made a magnetic racing car. We put another magnet under the table to see if the racing car would go and it did! So magnets work through liquids (water) and solids (table top).

Magnets have two different sides. They have a north and south side. These are called POLES. The north and south or south and north stick together. If they are the same, they do not work. We know that OPPOSITES ATTRACT.

We also tried to find out if there is iron in our breakfast cereal. Our experiment did not work, but it was interesting.

Everyday objects - which ones are magnetic?...

10p x
 cereal x
keys yes
hairslide yes
knife yes
5p x
1p yes
2p x
radiator x

IRON FILINGS

Iron filings are tiny particles of iron. Iron is a METAL. We put a magnet underneath the piece of card that had iron filings on the top. When we moved the magnet around, the iron filings moved around!!!

 

 

I made some butterflies and got them to fly using magnets.