Class LH launched the topic for this term, 'Scented Garden', by visiting Robin Wood and exploring the school playing field to look for signs of Spring and new growth. We found many buds, dandelions and daisies, and a variety of insects. We noticed that a lot of the trees were a bright lime green colour and we used the cameras to record the evidence that Spring is on its way! We are going to take photos of the same trees at the end of term and see how much the canopy has changed.
Identifying new growth on the chestnut trees.
Searching for the buds as a sign of new growth
At the end of the morning, we examined a yellow dandelion flower and compared it to the "white fluffy" head with the seeds ready to disperse. George pretended to be the wind and tried to blow the seeds off the head. We will be learning more about seeds.
Class LH have also been doing some off-line coding negotiating our way as bees around some flowers. We ‘programmed’ each other to buzz from one flower to another in order to find some pollen for pollination. Some of us had to ‘debug’ our 'algorithms' and start again to make them more accurate so that we landed ON the flowers and not next to them!!
Speaking to each other to debug the route and working in teams to find a better algorithm.
Fergus measuring the length of the gap to program the bee from one flower to get to another.
After that, in computing, we then used the bee-bots to negotiate a way around a flower garden. The bees had to avoid the nasty weed killer that the gardeners sometimes used. We worked in groups to layout the garden and then worked as a team to decide on the best route before programming the bee-bot to get from one beehive to another. Lots of discussion ensued about debugging the algorithm in order to make it more accurate.
Finding a way around to avoid the weed killer
Debugging the layout and changing cards around to help with the bee-bot journey.
Teamwork - talking about where the flowers should go before starting the algorithm
We're buzzing at the great start of our 'Scented Garden' topic!
