We have enjoyed celebrating national STEM week in Dosbarth Gwyn this week. We have been thinking about "Healthy Lifestyles" and how we can ensure we are being healthy. We have thought about the effects of exercise and eating a balanced diet.
At the beginning of the week we studied news reports, focusing on the key features of script writing and persuasive language, we created our own scripts and reports to promote healthy living. We recorded these using green screen filming.
We used hwb.com to write blogs about keeping fit and healthy and enjoyed sharing these with our friends.
On Monday we enjoyed creating our own healthy themed games using scratch. It is was a little tricky to start but it was lots of fun!
In order to help us see the effects of food and drink on our teeth we created our own investigations, it was very exciting!, we spent time thinking about the sugar content in different drinks where we studied nutrition facts and food labels to help us identify exactly how much sugar was in each drink. It was very interesting to weigh out the sugar for each to visualise exactly what the sugar content looked like. Some of our findings concerned us a little!! Have you ever seen what 36g of sugar looks like? We were surprised to find out that there was that much sugar in each 330ml of Pepsi!
A number of skills were required to complete the investigations and we explored with being mathematicians as well as scientists. We collated our results into graphs to share our findings with others and we used this knowledge to help us plan our own investigations to find out how sugary drinks can effect our teeth.
We choose 4 different soft drinks to place eggs in over a period of time (we used eggs because they contain calcium like our teeth) we monitored the changes over 3 days and recorded our results. We were quite shocked to see the damage that was made to the eggs. It's made us think a little about the amount of sugary drinks we may consume in a week- it's all a balance!
Friday was a very fascinating day! We had a very excited class of children requesting to view the solar eclipse! We talked about safe ways to enjoy the eclipse and encouraged the children to design their own way of viewing it safely, without looking directly at the sun.
We explored with buckets of water, coloured card, paper, colanders and Pringle pots. There was a very strange light cast across the playground and it was very pleasing to see the whole school engaged and excited about the eclipse!
On returning to class we enjoyed watching video footage of the 2015 eclipse where we could see more clearly as we were able to look directly at the sun/ moon because it was filmed with special cameras.
What a way to end our STEM week!