Nursery head for the stars

Pupils from the Brambletye Nursery found out about rockets today when two Year 8 girls visited from the Prep school. Nursery have been learning about the planets in our solar system.

The two Year 8 girls have already been accepted into their senior schools having successfully completed scholarship exams.

They demonstrated water rockets to the Nursery children.

The bottles are filled one third full of water

and then pumped with air.

Once the bottle has enough pressure the pump nozzle pushes out and .....

the bottle flies into the air. 

A message from Tim Peake

The Brambletye Science department has signed up to help Tim Peake with an experiment using seeds he has taken to space. Here is a message we received from the rhs today:

Good afternoon Rocket Scientists!

 Thank you again for signing up to Rocket Science, we hope you are looking forward to taking part.

 Our rocket seeds are still due to come back to Earth in March and we will be sending them out to you after the Easter holidays so sit tight! We will let you know nearer the time what day they are likely to arrive so you know to look out for them.

In the meantime, we have a very special message to everyone from Tim himself, up on the International Space Station! The message is to encourage more people to join the project but we thought you might like to see it too!

 To watch the message head here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OgSJKqDRFk Be sure to watch it with your pupils!

 

Tim will also be sending out some special photos on his Facebook and Twitter pages so help us spread the message by sharing and retweeting the photos if you can.

 

Happy viewing J

Best wishes,

The RHS Campaign for School Gardening Team

Year 8 work on owl pellets

Year 8 have been dissecting owl pellets. This will help them to know what the owl has been eating.

 The owl pellet is made of the bones and fur that the owl has swallowed

The owl coughs up these pellets rather than them going through the whole digestive system 

The pellets need soaking so they can break apart easily 

 Then the bones need to be separated from the fur

and washed  

Careful work is required so the delicate bones are not broken.  

The bones will now be soaked in bleach solution 

This cleans up the bones and kills any bacteria on them.

Testing a BigMac

Today 7C started their new topic Digestion and Nutrition with an experiment to test a BigMac for nutrients.

The BigMac was split into its component parts

so they can be tested

Testing with sodium hydroxide and copper sulphate 

to see if there is any protein 

Care must be taken with the sodium hydroxide, a strong alkali, as it is corrosive.

Using ethanol to extract the fat from food 

once filtered the solution will  

turn cloudy when drops of water are added

if it contains fat. Then record the result

 Iodine shows the presence of starch by turning from orange, brown to blue, black

 Benedict's solution turns from blue to green, orange or red if there is glucose in the food.

Lots of accurate testing 

means we now know......

 

Well, you will have to wait for the final report. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6S on microscopic safari

6S used their newly gained microscopy skills to look for single celled organisms in a moss clump
you can follow this link to see a short film on vimeo

Protoctista from Brambletye on Vimeo.

It was taken by pointing an iPhone down a microscope. My apologies for the not brilliant quality but I hope you find the subject matter interesting.

Year 7 Examine DNA

Not quite Silent Witness but we have extracted the DNA from an onion during our work on reproduction.

First get your equipment ready 

and read the instructions 

 

mix the onions with salt water

 

and grind together to crush the cells and dissolve the DNA 

the more its ground the better 

 

Then we need to filter the insoluble onion out of the mixture

We use cloth to filter the insoluble bits

The residue stays in the filter funnel 

The filtrate passes through into the measuring cylinder

 

We have to collect 50ml

 

 

 

 

 

Then we add washing up liquid to the filtrate 

this must be stirred in carefully as we don't want any froth

One class recorded their experiment photographically using the ipad 

Careful mixing

 

Just one spoonful

 

 

 

Now we need cold ethanol

This must be poured in carefully 

down the edge of the beaker

 

so that the ethanol floats on top of the solution

 if you are careful enough

then you get two distinct layers 

with a sort of white fluffy boundary 

this white stuff is the DNA 

which looks stringy 

well there is about 1m length of it in each cell! 

The DNA is the middle layer here